Serving the Message: Jury Duty in the Hands of a Poet

Guest blogger, Linda Dove

Sometime about halfway through the first day of voir dire, a funny thing happened to this prospective juror. It crossed my mind that I wanted to be there. That I wanted to do this. That I wanted them to pick me. Badly.

Really?, I thought to myself. Seriously?

As a member of the jury pool, you aren’t supposed to want to serve too much. In fact, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys are looking to weed out the wannabes. If you want to make it to the trial phase as one of 14 seated jurors, you should admit only a begrudging respect for the contribution your service would make to your community. And, as far as answering other questions, be as equanimous and balanced—as nearly non-committal—as possible.

But why should I bother offering tips on how to get chosen when the vast majority of people called for jury duty are searching for a way out? During the two-and-a-half days of voir dire that I sat through in late 2009, I watched women weep and shake, and men shout in anger. I heard horrific stories of rape, murder, muggings, car jackings, pistol whippings, police brutality, gang violence, and child abuse—some that had occurred in faraway conflicts of Eastern Europe and Sri Lanka, and some that had happened just off the Santa Monica freeway—but all of which now made it seemingly impossible for that potential juror to keep a fair and impartial view of the impending proceedings. And, while I’m not questioning for a minute that atrocities occur in this world of ours on a regular basis, I was rather amazed at the number of adults willing to swear an oath that they’re basically nonfunctioning and unreliable.

There were also the much more mundane business trips, vacation plans, university classes, illnesses, childcare issues. There was a parade of folks that met with the judge and lawyers at the sidebar, who likewise must have had compelling reasons why they could not serve, but who felt their stories too delicate for a public airing. There was one guy, the last or next-to-last of a 70+ person pool, who insisted that he would never be comfortable sending anyone to prison, regardless of guilt or innocence, given the deplorable state of our prison system, and certainly not a twenty-one-year-old for the rest of his life. And, no, it didn’t matter to him that, as jurors, we were not privy to the sentencing phase of things. “Prison doesn’t fix you,” he avowed. “It only makes you worse.” His opinion was his ticket out.

And so we were whittled down, the apparently unlucky few, who would indeed be responsible for deciding the guilt or innocence of a young black man accused of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and gang-related activity, and who did not for the life of me—or the life of him—seem much like a peer, beyond our shared humanity. I have no idea to this day why I felt so strongly that I was supposed to be part of that jury, why I ignored the choir of advice I was receiving—with my husband as lead soloist—about what I needed to say so that I might be released to my regularly-scheduled life. Certainly, there was no dramatic moment during deliberations when I became a sudden lightening rod of truth or justice, such as might happen in the movies. We did our due diligence, and—although I was initially one of three hold-outs who believed the evidence against the defendant did not meet the criteria for first-degree murder—my doubts were eventually put aside, thanks to a review of the expert testimony, and we did find him guilty on all counts.

I certainly did not know at the time I would write about the trial. I’m a poet, after all, not a journalist, not a non-fiction writer, not even a novelist; at the very least, court proceedings seem the province of prose. But the events that led to the trial wouldn’t leave me alone. I started hearing snippets of poems in my head, which—on the surface—appeared to have nothing to do with the trial testimony itself except in terms of the vague sense that someone on the periphery of great tragedy always has, which is the sense that things could have been different. Oh, so different.

I started to take these messages seriously, just as I took the “message” to get myself on the jury seriously, even though I still didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing exactly. All I knew was that I was being haunted—not by ghosts, not even by people I came to know through the trial, but by deer. Many, many deer. And their antlers.

If you’re thoroughly confused as to how this suburban poet, who is writing about a very urban set of events, could end up in the woods, then you’re not alone. I wasn’t sure at first, and neither were my early readers, who kept urging me to “make it more realistic,” “more historical,” “more concrete.” Instead, I made the manuscript more abstract. I stubbornly erased or hid direct references to the trial in an increasingly-dense bramble of metaphor. Antlers became the controlling image, a vision of how life could have branched off in other directions.

Of course, no one ends up winning in a case like this, or, rather, everyone loses. It was hard not to see the entire trial as a failed enterprise. Were we supposed to rejoice that justice was done? Abstraction seemed like the only thing I could do as a writer to honor both the complexity of my experience as juror and the enduring heartbreak of the families and friends, defendant and victims. It did not seem possible simply to retell; the words needed to reflect an altered reality.

That seemed like the real message of the trial to me.

Linda Dove’s first collection of poems, In Defense of Objects (Bear Star Press) received the 2009 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, O Dear Deer, (Squall Publishing), recently won the 2011 Eudaimonia Poetry Review Chapbook Award and was published in July. She lives in Altadena, California, with her husband, daughter, and two Jack Russell terriers.

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