A Trial By Jury

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: This is a great book. If anyone wonders what really goes on in jury deliberations, this puts you right there. You really feel the frustration of dealing with this group of people, who vary in different degrees from complete idiots to petty and childish. It may be our best example of democracy in action. The writing is great...it reads like a novel, and the final conclusions about the power of the state are a suprise and an insight I don't think you expect to get. You also get a sense that the system is so callous it treats jurors very poorly and inhumanely.

Rating:
Summary: An exercise in poor jury selection
Review: Mr. Burnett waxes eloquent as to his intellectual prowess, devastating insights, etc. But as he admits, he made up his mind not to vote for conviction before any real deliberations began. In my view, therefore, he "failed to deliberate" and violated his first and most important duty as a juror.

As a trial lawyer, this sort of self important doofus is exactly what we seek to exclude from jury panels.

The judge had it right at the end; a jury's service is valuable, but is by no means as rigorous, dangerous or important as that of many others in this society. Mr. Burnett felt that being cooped up on a jury for a few weeks merited a book -- he should grow up.

Rating:
Summary: Why Academics Make Lousy Jurors
Review: I've been a trial lawyer for more than 30 years. I've tried both civil and criminal cases. Currently I am a prosecutor. So I was interested in Burnett's book because it promised to give me a glimpse of how a jury conducts itself in deliberations. If the jury Burnett served on in Manhattan is any indication, it's like the saying that it's better not to see how sausage is made.
I don't fault all the members of this jury... A more alert prosecutor would have struck him at the outset when he observed him segregating himself from the rest of the jury panel, nibbling his fruits and nuts and reading his newspaper in the corner.
It is not the verdict the jury ultimately reached that is offensive. If the jury wanted to entertain a reasonable doubt whether or not the defendant acted in self defense, that was its prerogative. But to sit around and debate justice vs. the law for four days was simply a jury out of control, led by an academic who apparently operates on such a high intellectual plane that common sense is alien to him.
I'd be interested in what his fellow jurors make of Burnett's account of their common experience. My surmise is that they would not recognize his account. He was so off base that in the end, this is simply one man's subjective and distorted view of how the legal system functions.

Rating:
Summary: a surprising account
Review: My Book Club decided on A Trial by Jury as a major selection -- a book I would not have chosen. I was surprised by the quality of the writing and the many insights, both frightening and amazing, Burnett brought to his experience as juror. His account was objective/journalistic, even regarding his own behavior. The reader gets to know good and bad about the jurors, the criminals, and even the judge. This is a fine commentary of individuals and the system.
Brown Cardwell, author of JERICHO

Rating:
Summary: Power of the State
Review: Trials are a "retelling, in a string of words . . . a distressing distortion of the cluttered thickness of things as they happen."

Burnett is a Princeton history professor who writes of his experience as the foreman of a jury for a murder trial. He became foreman, when the original foreman just disappeared, just before the deliberations were to begin. Burnett considered the experience "the most intense sixty-six hours [hours of jury deliberation; the entire experience lasted seventeen days] of my life."

The case itself was not famous, albeit with some sensational aspects involving rape, transvestitism, and male prostitution, but it's a fascinating story of intense clashes between personalities in the jury room and an honest recollection of how a jury came to its conclusion. The various personalities on the jury come to life, and Burnett soon realizes that his stereotypical assumptions about some of them are drastically wrong. He comes across as somewhat stuffy and aloof, making a fetish of bringing his own food to eat (apples, nuts, etc.), rather than be stuck eating the restaurant food (which he admits doesn't look too bad) and reading in a corner - "Academics cultivate a certain pomposity, most of them" - rather than socializing - something I can easily relate to. He assumed he would not be chosen for the jury: "I promised to give any healthy prosecutor hives. I brought along a copy of The New York Review of Books just in case."

The jury is beset by frustration almost from the beginning. The judge's instructions are maddeningly unclear or confusing. The jurors have the choice of finding the accused guilty of first degree murder, second degree murder, or a variety of manslaughter charges, depending on their perception of his intent. And what of self-defense? Did they need to decide whether a murder had been committed first? Each time they send a question out to the judge, they learn that the entire courtroom must be reassembled, taking considerable time, and this colors their willingness to ask questions.

The truth can be elusive. "We associate truth with knowledge, with seeing things fully and clearly, but it is more correct to say that access to truth always depends on a very precise admixture of knowledge and ignorance." The jury puzzles over what they might not be allowed to see. The Simpson trial is a good example of the audience knowing much more about the evidence and assorted witnesses than the jury, which was excluded from the room often. In this case, the jury is deliberately not permitted to learn about the background of the defendant or others related to the case, information the jury would have liked to have. Searching for the truth haunts Burnett. "I realize now that for me - humanist, an academic, a poetaster - the primary aim of sustained thinking and talking had always been, in a way, more thinking and talking. Cycles of reading, interpreting, and discussing were always exactly that: cycles. One never 'solved' a poem, one read it, and then read it again - each reading emerging from earlier efforts and preparing the mind for future readings."

The trial, contrarily, demanded a solution and Burnett's account of the intense deliberations of the jurors recalls Twelve Angry Men.

The jury, in its inability to reach a verdict, quickly begins to debate the very nature of what constitutes justice. Adelle, one of the jurors, another academic, said on the third day of deliberations, after a contentious second day, "We've been told that we have to uphold the law. But I don't understand what allegiance I should have to the law itself. Doesn't the whole authority of the law rest on its claim to be our system of justice? So, if the law isn't just, how can it have any force?" Burnett "sensed that people were starting to perceive the law as overly clumsy, somehow that it was a blunt tool - and that the higher principle, justice, had cast a kind of spell in the room." In this case, the "dictates of justice demanded that we circumvent the law."

Ultimately, what the jurors came to realize was that the burden of proof for the prosecution is very high because the power of the state is so strong. The jurors themselves had been subject to this power. They had been refused the right to go home [ they were refused phone calls home, were forced to stay in a moth-eaten motel and were refused the ability to have a a prescription refilled, ultimately sending one of the jurors to a hospital], sent "men with guns to watch you take a piss, it [the state] could deny you access to a lawyer [one of the jurors wanted to know her rights as a juror], it could embarrass you in public [the judge upbraided Burnett in public for standing at slow moments to exercise a bad leg] and force you to reply meekly, it could, ultimately, send you to jail - all this without even accusing you of a crime."

Rating:
Summary: A Jury of One
Review: I found this book in the library and at the time, had no knowledge of its publisher's heavy push, its substantial hardcover printing, or the author's 10-city book tour as mentioned in the PW and other reviews.

It seemed interesting, and the jacket blurbs referring to "Twelve Angry Men" were appealing.

Other reviewers have stated simply the differences between what the book jacket promises, and what's in the book. Literature, especially this type, responds to the world; it does not direct it.

I've heard dozens of people complain about jury duty, and dozens more say that it's pointless. Despite Professor Burnett's statements to the contrary (after these pages of complete self-obsession and disrespect for his fellow jurors, and every living being in the courtroom with the possible exception of the sommnolent history-loving bailiff) - his "affirmations" that the jury system still works, although men like his fellow juror Felipe should not be allowed to sit - this book tells the story of a jury of one. One man who is no better than, and perhaps a bit worse than all those other people who want to weasel out of jury duty, who don't take it seriously, or who think the system doesn't work.

Those who read this book will learn what the professor ate during sequestration (fruit, nuts, cheese, bread, fennel bulbs). Blood oranges! A dozen blood oranges in New York City. A blood orange is insipid, an expensive luxury that appeals to the eye, but tastes far less rich than an ordinary Navel. They will learn that men who wear large belt buckles that say "Rodeo" are usually knee-jerk conservative "good 'ol boys." Except sometimes they're not. They will learn that the Professor read The Economist during lunch breaks, while sitting in a pleasant, sunny corner. Eating fruit and nuts.

Imagine Bosie Douglas sitting on, and writing about a jury trial. The Professor describes, and quotes, his sixth-grade performance of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." The witnesses in the trial at hand were mostly drag queens. They had names like Nahteesha and Hector-Laverne. I would like to have known more of them, but they, like everyone else in that courtroom and in that jury room, were not "real" to the Professor. They were neither orange, nor almond. Nor a hard wedge of cheese. Nor belt buckles.

The Professor discloses in a weak moment that he came into the trial wanting a hung jury. Before any evidence was heard, his initial plan was "hung jury." He spends the first days of his jury foremanship seeking that same hung jury, observing and manipulating the others and their various "camps" of guilty or not-guilty, then inexplicably, he changes and comes down on the side of "not guilty." And that is how all voted in the end. I'm not spoiling anything - there is no suspense whatsoever and the entire crime and the "end" is detailed in the beginning of the book.

Most people think the jury system is stupid, and that the legal system is even worse: fumbling, blindly cruel, ultimately injust. Most people would rather have a root canal than serve on a jury. Yet, I think, that if any of these same people were somehow indicted for a crime they didn't commit, every single one of them would want a jury of their peers.

Yet some people do not believe in the fundamental concept of "peer" or "community," and that is absolutely what this book is about. The Professor proposes no alternative to trial by jury; his single cogent, factual argument consists of explaining that "not guilty" is not synonymous with "innocent," and that is true. His example of why the jury system is flawed is Felipe, who seems incoherent and strange (although not provably "stupid," the author's efforts aside), yet it is the Professor who came into the situation committed to a "hung jury," and it is the Professor who manipulated and bludgeoned his fellow jury members into coming to a "not guilty" verdict after days of noncommunication about nonfacts. It does not seem from the limited description of the courtroom case that the State proved "beyond a reasonable doubt," and nearly everyone knows that this is what must be done for a conviction. So, there is a "happy ending" in the sense that this isn't about a miscarriage of justice, for the defendant doesn't seem to have been proven guilty.

This book proves that even the most effete, out of touch, biased, arrogant, bullying, self-obsessed, manipulative, confused and mediocre intellectual can function on a jury of peers and that said jury can come to a decision that was probably appropriate.

I don't know what to say about the publisher's evaluation that this was a book "about the jury system" or anything like "Twelve Angry Men," which depicts twelve individuals as opposed to a jury of one. I don't know what to say about why they thought this odd document that reaffirms that effete, capricious, self-obsessed faux-intellectualism is alive and well and that male academicians can still effectively bully female academicians perfectly well, without a second thought, or that people who dress, look, act, and obsess over perceived slights like Bosie Douglas are "the cutting edge" and worth 100,000 hardcovers and a ten book tour. Maybe it's really an amazing story because it's a wonder that a second murder wasn't committed in the jury room. I think that's it.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting read
Review: While reading a Trial By Jury, I could not help but to get the sense that the entire legal system is nothing more than a rotting edifice, ready to fall into a million pieces at any moment. However, the only thing that seems to be preventing this fate from occurring is the jury system. It is this system, this left over from medieval England that Burnett attempts to describe, which he does with amazing clarity. Although, Burnett does come off as a snob belittling others, this should in no way be allowed to detract from his story. What Burnett describes are the inner workings of a very complicated throwback to direct democracy. Without this throwback, without these12 citizens, some of whom may be snobbish academicians, while others may be high school dropouts, the American legal system would be nothing more than a return to the non-democratic Roman system of law. For all its sophistication, and history, European justice is nothing more than a relic of Justinians code, a reminder of the type of justice many of our forefathers originally fled from. However, I must say that this book does a great job to show the non-lawyer the importance of the modern American jury system and it's relation to American Democracy.

Rating:
Summary: Could have been better
Review: It is easy to pick on people that are less educated than you, and, if you are very well educated like this author, to do it in a way that seems less than mean spirited, however real people are difficult to understand and this is what the book unfortunately missed. The author approaches his subject "critically" rather than with curiosity. Because of his intelligance, his education, his experiance, etc., he obviously feels that he "knows" what he is talking about. And, about many things, some of which are in this flawed book, this is true. But, he could have learned many things and this is the problem with the book. While as a trial lawyer I found the book useful, I would hesitate to say that I also found it to be good.

Rating:
Summary: A terrific, insightful book by a careful, thoughtful writer
Review: This is a great book by an excellent writer. I read a lot and I consider this one of the best two or three books I have read in the last year or two. It is well written in prose which draws the reader into the scenes and takes us into the dark underside of the machine of justice. In fact, to me this book reaches one of the great goals of all important literature: it allows us to truly sense and understand people and a place where we might never go ourselves, in a way that is memorable and meaningful.

I find the writer's comments about his fellow jurors to the carefully constructed, logical and not at all meanspirited. Of course, it is all be inevitible that there will be jerks on almost any jury, but the writer is generally restrained, or tries to be, in exposing his personal judgements. He is taking us on a personal trip into this world and I find him to be a good and steady guide. We might have learned more about these people, but what we do learn seems to be enough to flesh out the story.

Having been called for jury duty a couple of times myself (but not having served), it was clear to me from the beginning that it would be a journey of discovery of one's fellow citizens and their abilities behind the mask of everyday life. Even in the jury pool, one could get a sense that there is a lot more, good and bad, to people around you that would be revealed in the crucible of the juryroom. This book brings that experience to life in a gripping and telling way I will never forget.

Unlike most writers, Burnet even manages a moment of (unintended) humorous self insight. In talking about his occupation as an academic, he says the jury process led him to understand that in his profession the debate about truth assumes more importance than truth itself. For academics, the purpose of raising questions is to allow more questions to be discussed and written about later. He came to realize that this would not do in the jury room. Would that more writers could share his honesty and ability to see flaws in himself.

In discussing the decision to let the defendant go free, Burnet reveals that the juror's disgust with the way they, the jury, were being treated as virtual prisioners of the judicial system could have contributed to the verdict. Listen up, yea people of the courts! Even dogs get their day and if you treat people like dogs, they sometimes insist on bitting back. The wheels of justice might just grind your own hand. The judge in the case comes off as a tired, rancid old man from hell intent on taking a few scalpes back with him.

My only complaint, a mild one, is that the writer might have included some history of the jury system, its evolution and some information about countries around the world where juries of citizens do not make key decisions (almost everywhere). Having said that, I would highly recommend this book. The case is not a pretty one (few are). The paritcipants are sometimes ignoble and petty, but, in the end, they deserve our thanks for their seriousness of purpose and the final result. The same can be said of this book. An excellent, short read that can renew your faith in our fellow citizens, warts and all.

Rating:
Summary: Pretentious Blind Man and an Elephant
Review: I purchased this book on the basis of reviews that said it gave new insight into the workings of U.S. juries (which have certainly been mystifying of late in highly publicized trials). The author is so self-involved and pretentious, however, that all the musings are through a glass darkly. He considers himself a jury of one with regard to his fellow jurors, the officers of the court, and the entire judicial system, and he strives with the single-mindedness of a bad graduate student to fit his experience into his academic intellectual constructs. The judge, and some of the other jurors, in the case must have found him laughable. The weird "true crime" underpinnings of the "intellectual" gloss remind me of Victorian painters who disguised their lasciviousness in Greek and Roman props. A big disappointment.