A Trial By Jury

Rating:
Summary: An outstanding exploration of the jury system.
Review: A book that I will certainly re-read in the future, A Trial By Jury was a gripping read. Detailing the author's experience as a juror in a second-degree murder case, it touches on most of the aspects of being a jury in today's society, both positive and negative. Some reviewers have blasted the author for his purported pretension, but I did not take his writing that way. He is an academic, yes, but understands the weaknesses in both himself and this country's jury system.

Fans of true crime, sociology or even any non-fiction would enjoy this book.

Rating:
Summary: Horrible
Review: As another reviewer also noted, I looked forward to this book as an opportunity to learn more about what happens inside a jury room. Unfortunately, this book was instead the self-serving vehicle for a pretentious, obtuse, and socially challenged individual. I must admit, I could not even finish this book due in large part to my ever increasing disgust with the author and the "tone" of the book.
The author was at least honest enough to admit that he had a heavy bias towards defendants in our judicial system, and that the prosecution stood little chance of ever swaying him. Our jury system is in serious peril when members of our society, such as this author, decide to treat their civic responsibility as nothing more than an academic exercise.
Do not read this book! It is not about the process, it is not about our judicial system, it is not even about a jury. This book is all about Mr. Burnett and how wonderful he is, how his superior intellect saved the day, and how he persevered through having to spend time with people not up to his own level of education and refinement.
The author admits at one point that his initial goal was to have the jury be deadlocked. This was due to his own cowardice and inability to follow the law or his own conscience. He must have thought he would sell more books if they could reach a verdict.

Rating:
Summary: Honest portrayal of jury life, but lacks courtroom tension.
Review: D. Graham Burnett, an assistant Princeton history professor, brings us a lively, honest look at the inner world of juries in the slim volume entitled, A Trial by Jury. Burnett's writing style is casual and easily accessible in describing the jury he joyfully found himself leading.
The Manhattan murder trial has the defendant claiming self-defense. The burden of proof lies on the state to prove Monte Milcray did not act in self-defense after stabbing Randolph Cuffee twenty-odd times. Milcray's story about the hot August night changes several times. Erroneous facts spring forth as key elements begin to slowly seep into the story: a rendezvous encounter with a transvestite via the dating phone service. Unfortunately, the author decides to reveal the verdict in the opening pages of the book. Burnett then back peddles to the beginning: a week of jury selection, two weeks of evidence and then the four days of closed deliberations.
Clearly those who need instant gratification will love the author's choice for the up-front verdict. This reader would have preferred more tension in the vein of 12 Angry Men; the movie magnificently portrays the inherent conflict of twelve disparate people dissecting evidence to reach a conclusion. That balled-up tense feeling one gets in the gut is sadly absent here since we know the outcome early on.
However, there are many keen insights and fine discussions about law and justice. The juror Adelle says,
I realized that what I keep wanting here is for us
to figure out some way to do justice, but I am
starting to realize that the law itself may be a
different thing. What is my real responsibility?
The law? Or the just thing? I'm not sure what the
answer is? 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 effectively brings us the emotions felt within the sealed jury room. The writing is palpable and quickly sparks one's imagination. The reader is privileged to the endemic shortcomings of the court. A Trial by Jury enables you to be the proverbial fly on the wall, listening and watching twelve individuals from various backgrounds decide a man's fate.



Rating:
Summary: Eavesdrop on a jury
Review: Every lawyer would like to eavesdrop on jury deliberations. This book offers the next best thing-a first hand account of a juror's reactions to a murder trial, complete with a detailed account of the jurors' discussions and argument during the deliberations. The author is more than a little pretentious (he spends his free time "doing" poetry and keeps a fountain pen as "a fetish always to hand") and condescending (he originally assumes that a fellow juror, wearing a rodeo belt buckle "apparently without irony" must be a bigot and likely to push for a guilty verdict "if not a lynching"). The description of daily tedium, nightly sequestering in a cheap hotel, and constant unkindness from the judge ("Juror number eight, you will look at me when I address the court") probably won't inspire people to want to serve on a jury. Nevertheless, the amount of detail presented and the author's insight into the jury's deliberations make this book well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Listen to the recorded version
Review: For those who found (or think they may find) this book pretentious or smug, I strongly suggest you listen to the recorded version. It's recorded by the author himself. I suspect that in the printed version, what Burnett intended to be self-deprecating or self-parodying did indeed come across as self-important. When you hear the author's voice and intonations, though, it's clear that he is aware of his own flaws. In fact, these flaws are part of the story, as much as are the quirks of any of the other characters (jurors). The last lines of the book could not be more clear about the author's awareness of how far he fell short of his duty.

I thought his ruminations on justice, his insight about the difference between literature and law, were perceptive and fascinating -- as were the glimpses into the strange bonding experience of jury duty. Well worth a read -- or a listen.

Rating:
Summary: Candid to a fault.
Review: I am already ahead of the everyone else here. I saw this book in the library and picked it up for a quick read that would remind me, as the cover states, of "12 angry men". That isn't exactly what I got. But, I'll be honest and say that I liked this book a great deal more than most of the readers seem to have (and I didn't have to buy it).

I did fined the author both silly and condescending. He used his power and position as Forman to harangue the jury until he got his verdict. He tells of his fellow-jurors and their lower mental abilities. He is exasperated that people can still have an opinion different from his even after he explains the truth to them, He speaks openly of how he tries to get the jury to hang and how he initially saw his role as prolonging the talking and thinking. Hoping never to reach a verdict but simply to keep the talking going on forever and ever. However he seems to find that the time for talking ends just about the time that he is running out of his own private stash of vegetarian food. This plays a large part in the book but really it isn't surprising since most people who are forced to be somewhere (prison, college, the hospital) seem to get a little obsessive on the subject of meals.

Burnett tries to present, to the members of the jury, and impassive and impartial façade. Or so he thinks. He admits to stopping conversations that he feels are leading towards a conviction, he prepares a statement to be read in court to make sure that the judge understands the jury's (i.e. Burnett's) view on Law as opposed to Justice, and he gives a long lecture on the same subject to the rest of the jury under the guise of deliberations.

In his book Burnett admits that he knows little about the subject of jurisprudence and that some of the facts were fudged. But it was OK as he was trying to make a point. How nice. Nothing likes throwing around your weight as an academic and then making it all up (this reminded me of the Professor on "Gilligan's Island").

Now then how could I like the book? Because this is real and this is how things really can and do happen. This was a jury this was a case and this was a verdict. People are fooling themselves if they think that each of the 11 other members of the jury were not just as self-absorbed as the author in some way or another. I can't get 12 people in a room for an hour to agree on where to call for take-out lunch four days in a jury would kill most people I know. This book was not a pretty picture of how justice is given or denied, but that does not mean it is inaccurate.

Rating:
Summary: Inadvertent self-satire: hard to read but easy to skim
Review: I do not want to repeat what other reviewers have stated better than I could, but I do want to reinforce their opinions. They are correct that this book would have been better were it about the jury or the experience of judgment more and about the author and his high opinion of himself less.

I was amazed and amused by the pedantry and pretensions, but I am academic and therefore used to that. What I was less amused but more amazed to discover was that a writer who so esteemed himself throughout the monograph cannot write well. I should have seen this coming, however. The author stated at the beginning that this was his account of his experiences. As I read, I confirmed that this was a book about Mr. Burnett into which the criminal case, the judge, the lawyers, the accused, the evidence, the courthouse staff, and other jurors would intrude from time to time. Given Burnett's fascination with his mental prowess and process, what I regarded as digressions he would have seen as the essences.

Do not buy this book. Go to a public library and get ANATOMY OF A JURY by Seymour Wishman or secure a copy of a "Frontline" cassette called "Inside the Jury Room." That "Frontline" had a pretentious academic, but he was not allowed to dominate.

If you must look at this book, examine it at the bookstore. Skip the parts about what Mr. Burnett ate [please do not believe that I am kidding] and find references to subjects about which you might care. Read those quickly. You can push through this book in an hour or so.

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 important book
Review: I have recently, for some reason, become very interested in the legal system and its vicissitudes. 'A Trial by Jury' is a well-written book, of that there is no doubt. I will agree with the criticism directed against the author's overly pedantic view of things but the reader is given enough warning of this by the author himself in the first few pages. I especially thought his 'apples, blood oranges and almonds' bit was a little too bewildering for my tastes. All this however, should not stand in the way of digesting this work as it is a very credible point-of-view of the inner workings of a trial by jury (in New York, anyway). The reader will be particularly impressed by the well-reasoned and similarly well-stated conclusion about the awesome power of the state as it goes about the business of keeping it's citizens in check. A very good read and highly recommended.

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.