Trials Without Truth: Why Our System of Criminal Trials Has Become an Expensive Failure and What We Need to Do to Rebuild It

Chapter 10: Juries

CHAPTER TEN Juries The Loss of Public Confidence The Need to Rethink Juries A criminal justice system is an organic whole that is only as strong as its weakest part. A system may have the greatest trial procedures in the world, but if the rules governing the investigation do not allow the police to gather a sufficient amount of reliable evidence or to conduct a complete and thorough investigation, the system will always be weak. Similarly, even if the procedures governing criminal investigations are sensible and fair and the police carrying out the investigation are highly competent and professional, the system will be weak if its trial procedures do not allow important pieces of reliable evidence to be admitted at trial or if the trial procedures do not permit the evidence that has been admitted to be sufficiently examined and tested. In short, a good trial system is just as important as sound investigative practices for a strong criminal justice system. In this chapter I want to talk about another crucial link in the system: the fact finders who ultimately determine the defendant’s guilt or innocence. No matter how strong a system’s investigative and trial procedures may be, if the fact finders are not up to the task of evaluating the evidence fairly and competently, or cannot be trusted to understand and apply the law to the facts, that trial system will never be strong. Right now we are suffering through a cri200 sis of confidence in our jury system. Probably everyone is familiar with some juries’ stunning acquittals or failures to convict in important cases in recent years. In 1991, a jury in Manhattan acquitted El-Sayyid Nosair of murdering Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League. The judge who had presided over the trial declared the jury’s verdict “against the overwhelming weight of the evidence and devoid of common sense and logic.”1 Jews in both New York and Israel took to the streets in protest. In 1992, a Brooklyn jury acquitted Lemrick Nelson, Jr., of stabbing Yankel Rosenbaum to death during a violent encounter between blacks and orthodox Jews. Before his death, Rosenbaum had identified Nelson as his attacker and the murder weapon was found in Nelson’s possession.2 Thousands of orthodox Jews marched to protest the acquittal. The evening after the verdict was returned jurors and their spouses attended a celebration hosted by the defendant ’s attorney.3 The worst race riots in American history began on April 29, 1992, the day that a California jury failed to convict any of the four Los Angeles police officers videotaped beating Rodney King with batons as he lay on the ground. The jury’s action precipitated two days of violence that resulted in fifty-eight deaths and almost one billion dollars in property damage.4 The Los Angeles riots were strikingly similar in their origin to the Miami riots twelve years earlier , when four white police officers were acquitted of any criminal liability by an all-white jury for the beating death of a black motorist stopped for a traffic violation. The trial of the Menendez brothers and the O. J. Simpson trial are so well known that little need be said. The Menendez brothers drove to San Diego in an Alfa Romeo given them by their father in order to buy a shotgun which they then used to kill their parents as they watched television. The gun was fired sixteen times. Although these handsome young men claimed they had been victims of their father’s abuse, why their mother should also have been gunned Juries 201 down was never very clear. Neither of the original juries—there was a joint trial but separate juries for each of the brothers—was able to agree on whether the brothers had murdered either of their parents .5 After eight months of trial, the jury in the O. J. Simpson case deliberated for just three hours before reaching its not guilty verdict . (The Simpson jury, like all criminal juries, had been instructed numerous times by the trial judge not to discuss the case among themselves until the end of the trial.) This handful of cases is but one of many other signs of a jury system in trouble. There is the growing phenomenon of jurors who stubbornly insist on hanging the jury in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt. In March 1997...