Areas of Unrest

24 November 1999 - The Bermuda Triangle and Jury Duty

QOTD: "In formal logic, a contradiction is a signal of defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory." - Alfred North Whitehead

Reading: Jill Churchill, Anything Goes

Listening to: A video of a Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen from 1987 (just listening and not really watching)

I finished jury duty on Monday and I will write about it in a minute, but first I want to pass along a great news story I heard the other day on The World (an international news program on public radio). The Japanese are trying to solve their energy problems by offshore drilling of gas hydrates. (I think this refers to organic substances like methane; I missed the very beginning of the story.) One concern is that these chemicals can cause water to froth and the resulting frothy mixture is not buoyant enough to support the drilling platforms, which float just fine on normal water. The neat part is that the scientist who was talking about this risk mentioned that it would explain the disappearance of ships in the Bermuda triangle, which is another region where there are concentrations of gas hydrates under the ocean floor. Small seismic disturbances can cause the release of the gas, which causes the water to froth, which causes the ship to sink for no apparent reason.

As for jury duty, it started bright and early a week ago Monday (the 15th) at the Beverly Hills Municipal Court. I had been on jury duty at that courthouse before and they didn't have a weapons screening at the time. Now the elevator from the parking lot goes only to the lobby and you have to put your bag through an x-ray and walk through a metal detector. So they caught me trying to smuggle a weapon into the courthouse. Okay, I wasn't trying to smuggle anything, but they did make me go back to my car and leave my embroidery scissors behind. The guard said that blunt kindergarten type scissors are okay, but that you can't bring in anything with a point. This is annoying as it means I can only work on large sections of my needlepoint while waiting in the jury room, but I wasn't going to argue the matter with somebody who had a gun.

And, of course, there is plenty of waiting. First they ask for all the people who are requesting hardship waivers or postponements. Then we go off to one of the courtrooms for orientation. When we return to the jury room, we're checked in (your summons has a bar-coded badge which is scanned for this purpose) and settle down to more waiting. This takes most of the morning. Just before we leave for lunch, about 30 names are called - mine included - and we are told to report to the West L.A. Municipal Court (about 3 miles west) after lunch.

The jury assembly room at the West L.A. courthouse is the worst I've ever been in, a musty trailer with too few seats and a carpet that smells badly of mildew. On the plus side, the television doesn't work, so I am spared the cacophony of afternoon talk shows. Still, I am relieved when my name is one of those called for a panel after only a half hour or so wait. We're taken over to the main building where we go through another weapons screening, making me glad I hadn't put my scissors back in my tote bag. Then we're taken to another building and take seats in the courtroom of Division 99. The judge tells us the case is expected to last about a week and asks if anybody has conflicts with that. He then names the defendant, the lawyer and expected witnesses and asks if anybody knows any of them. Nobody having been dismissed yet, the first twelve names are called and seated in the jury box and voir dire begins. I am still a spectator at this point.

The process of jury selection continues through Monday afternoon and well into Tuesday morning. A few years back there was a change in state law and judges can conduct all of voir dire themselves if they wish; however, they usually do allow the lawyers to ask some questions and this judge is no exception. There's a standard set of questions everyone answers - name, area of residence, marital status, occupation, spouse's occupation, prior jury service. This is followed by questions about interactions with law enforcement and experience with fights since the case involves a violent neighbor dispute. There are a few people who sound to me like they are trying to get dismissed (e.g. one woman who admits to a bias against the police though she says she could set that aside while serving on a jury). One woman is dismissed for cause when it turns out she knows the father of the defense attorney. A few people are dismissed by each side using their peremptory challenges until there is a panel of 12 people who both sides are willing to accept. I am still a spectator.

And then it is time to choose alternates. Two names are announced - neither of them mine - and I begin to fear that I will have to return to that dreary jury room. The first potential alternate states his occupation as "unemployed, but I am starting a job next Monday." When the judge figures out that he is referring to the 22nd, he is dismissed, as the case might go that long and the judge believes that missing the first day of a new job would constitute a hardship. My name is called and I take the Alternate #1 seat. Voir dire for the alternates seems much quicker, perhaps because there are just two of us, the lawyers accept us both and we are sworn in.

The trial turns out to involve four counts - elder abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, brandishing, and battery. The opening statements just give us a general picture of what each side hopes to prove. The prosecution plans to show that the defendant attacked her neighbor with a stick; the defense is going to claim self-defense. Nothing in the opening is evidence, of course, but it creates a general context.

The first witness for the prosecution is the victim, an elderly Spanish-speaking man who testifies via an interpreter. This creates an interesting complication, as he does understand some English and sometimes starts to answer before the questions are translated. He also sometimes starts to answer in English, leading the judge to explain to him (and to us) that only the testimony translated by the interpreter counts. This makes listening more difficult, particularly as I can understand some Spanish and I have to be careful to wait for the translation.

His story is that the whole matter arose out of a long-standing dispute with his neighbor about her garbage cans. Their properties back on a common alley (i.e. the backs of the two houses face each other across the alley). She keeps leaving her cans next to his cinder block wall and he is concerned about the damage to the wall done by the claw mechanisms the trucks use to lift the cans. (I should explain that these are standard City of Los Angeles garbage cans. People who live in houses or in small apartment buildings get various color cans for different sorts of trash - normal garbage, recyclables, and yard waste. Different trucks come for each type of can, with them coming the same day but not quite at the same time.)

On the morning in question, he went out to take in the first of his garbage cans and found her can next to his wall again. He brought it over to her property. When he went inside, she came over to his property and dumped out his other two cans (not yet collected) in his driveway. He went out and put the garbage back in the cans. She dumped out the cans again. When he was bending over putting the garbage back in the cans again, she started beating him with a stick or stake. At some point, she went back to her property and got a second stick. Several pictures of his injuries - scrapes on his arm and a bleeding wound on the back of his head - were admitted into evidence and shown to us. There was also some questioning about an injury on his leg, but we were not shown a picture of it. In the course of that questioning, he testified that they'd had a fight over the garbage cans about a year earlier and he had a scar on his leg from her kicking him.

He was also questioned about an aluminum rod that is mentioned in the police report. He denied using it against her, denied that it broke the stick she hit him with, and claims essentially that it was just something in his trash left from a remodeling project. He goes on to deny ever hitting, shoving or pushing her at all.

The defense attorney tries to bring in a few side issues in the cross-examination. One of these involves how much English the victim understands and the unstated question is whether his statements in the police report could be accurate if he was interviewed in English. The other one I noticed was whether there was graffiti on the cinder block wall. It's pretty obvious to me that we're supposed to question how important the garbage can issue could be if he tolerates graffiti.

The remaning prosecution witnesses are three of the police officers who responded to the call. One of them examined the defendent for injuries, since she claimed she had been the actual victim. Unfortunately for the defense, the police officer didn't see any signs of injury. The gist of the story from the police report is that they got a call from a neighbor involving people fighting with sticks in the alley. The defendent flagged them down when they arrived and claimed she was attacked by her neighbor, took a stick (actually, the handle of a pooper scooper that is kept inside the gate of her property) to defend herself and the stick broke against a metal rod that he had.

The defense story is, of course, rather different. The defendent testifies that she went out to take in her trash can which was indeed next to the cinder block wall. The victim was moving it and she called out to him to stop. She then went to look and make sure it was empty and, while she was peering inside it, he clobbered her on the head with something hard. She could barely stand and her glasses flew off into the alley. When she bent to pick up her glasses, which were badly bent from the attack, he began hitting her and touching her. Since she is 9 inches shorter than him, she couldn't get away and was very frightened. She managed to scrape him with her keys and that's how he got injured. He went inside and she went back to her property where she rested for an hour. She went back out to take in her other can, saw him standing in his yard glaring at her, and picked up the pooper scooper, thinking that if he saw that she had a stick, he wouldn't mess with her. He went in and got an aluminum pole and started coming at her. She used the stick to defend herself and it broke against the pole. He then said that he was going to get a gun so she ran back to her place and called the police.

On cross-examination, we hear a lot about the medical reports taken when she was arrested. The defendent says the doctors told her that she had bad head trauma, but the report mentions only asthma and complaints of shoulder pain. When she's asked why the police report doesn't mention a gun, she just says she is astonished that they didn't write that down.

One of the jurors has a medical appointment that means leaving after the defendent's testimony. The judge says that, while he would normally just delay the proceedings to accomodate this, he needs to get this case completed. He dismisses her and I move from alternate status to being a regular member of the jury. I'm grateful, since that means I don't have to sit around in the hall killing time when deliberations start.

The next defense witness is essentially a character witness, a woman who has known the defendent since kindergarten and insists she would never hurt a fly. Finally, the man who lives in the other half of the duplex the defendent occupies testifies. The only particularly interesting points there (aside from his also serving as a character witness) are that he contradicts her testimony about exactly where the pooper scooper was (she said it was just inside the gate; he says it was 10-15 feet inside) and he reluctantly admits that she is an actress.

Throughout the proceedings, there are a lot of objections, particularly during the defendent's testimony as she keeps adding information she was not asked about. The prosecutor wishes to submit some additional physical evidence in rebuttal, but we never see it because of defense objections. So we move on to the closing statements, which essentially reiterate each side's view of the matter.

The judge's instructions come on Thursday morning and are fairly complex, largely because there are four counts which need to be explained. A key instruction involves the right to self-defense. In order to invoke that right, you must first indicate a desire to stop fighting, inform the other party that you wish to stop fighting, and actually attempt to stop fighting. However, you also have the right to pursue and stand your ground. That is, the right to self-defense doesn't end just because you can get away. Much of the discussion during deliberations will focus on the issue of self-defense.

After the judge has read the instructions, we go to the jury room. The alternate doesn't get to be part of deliberations, so she has to cool her heels out in the hallway for hours on end. We look at the photographs and at the defendent's medical report as we begin to discuss what we've heard. About the only thing that there's any consensus on is that the whole case is pretty bizarre and both the victim and the defendent have too much time on their hands. As we talk, it becomes obvious that we will need to have some testimony read back to us, in order to clarify the sequence of events. That also helps us eliminate the large amount of testimony that was stricken from the record in response to objections and to clarify what the victim said via the interpretor (as opposed to what he said in Spanish; if you use an interpretor, then only the translation counts as evidence). It will take some time for the court reporter to locate the relevant pieces of testimony, so we continue discussing.

The biggest problem is pretty obviously that the case amounts to "he said, she said." Even the police officers only know what they were told when they arrived on the scene, after the fight was over. Everybody agrees that neither the victim nor the defendent is telling the whole story. As the discussion continues, another of the instructions becomes important. Namely, if a witness is not telling the truth about one matter, you can ignore the rest of the testimony. (You can, however, choose to believe part of their testimony if it seems credible.) There's a lot of discussion about the inconsistencies in the defendent's story. Nobody believes that she told the police anything about him mentioning a gun. The police would have taken that seriously and handled matters differently if she had and it seems very unlikely that it would not have been mentioned in the police report. Her claim of a head injury is also dubious. The medical report states that she complained of asthma and of "shoulder pain from her neighbor hitting her." If she'd really had a head injury, the doctors would have taken that seriously and noted it on the report.

So it comes down to how much sense the victim's story makes. It seems unlikely that she would start beating him without something else happening. Most of us think there were at least words and possibly a shove. There's also a small discrepancy regarding whether or not he used the metal rod to try to defend himself and exactly how the stick (i.e. the pooper scooper handle) broke.

For me, the decision rests on her statement that she picked up the pooper scooper to try to frighten him when she went back out. Doing that an hour after someone has "clobbered" you doesn't seem to indicate a desire to stop fighting. So I find her claim of self-defense dubious. His story has holes in it, but they seem to me to be minor ones, attributable to the failure of memory after four months. She has the benefit of having heard the police testimony, so the inconsistencies in her story seem more significant to me.

But everybody has different ideas of what constitutes reasonable doubt and our balloting shows us pretty much evenly split. We go around the table, with each person stating their position and the reasons for it, but there's not much change after we do that. There's more discussion about what a deadly weapon is, with a few people questioning whether or not the broken handle of a pooper scooper qualifies. The assault with a deadly weapon charge has a lesser included count of assault and, if we could potentially find her not guilty of assault with a deadly weapon but guilty of assault. But the right to self-defense is still applicable to assault and this option doesn't let us reach unanimity since there are still jurors who find her story plausible enough.

We had hoped to finish on Friday, but that proves impossible. Monday morning sees us still hopelessly deadlocked. In fact, we're about as evenly divided as we could be and, via the bailiff, we inform the judge we will be unable to reach a verdict. I'm actually pretty satisfied, though, because everybody has been sincerely trying to look at the evidence and the instructions in good faith. This was not the case in some of my past jury experience so I am pleasantly surprised. When we return to the courtroom, the judge polls us to make sure that nobody thinks we could reach a unanimous verdict with further deliberation. Satisfied that we agreed to disagree, he declares a mistrial and we're released from jury service. We go back to the jury room trailer and scan our badges to check out, receiving printed proof of jury service in response. (You keep one copy; your employer gets the other.) In a couple of weeks, the check will arrive (a whopping $5 a day plus 15 cents a mile one way; my employer will deduct the $5 a day from my paycheck), but I need to keep my proof of service for future reference, especially as my company only pays every other year and you can be summoned every year.

And, I know that it is likely I will get another summons for jury duty in a year or two. That's one of the facts about life in Los Angeles. I know people in other places - even other cities in California - who have served just once or twice in 20 years, but everyone I know here gets called at frequent intervals. I don't mind, really, as I find it interesting to see the process at work. And you learn such fascinating things about the seamier side of human nature. Without jury duty, would I ever have thought to contemplate what kind of circumstances could lead to assault with a deadly pooper scooper?