I Fought (for) the Law

NEW YORK—Ariane Diaz was the state’s principal witness and only four years older than I. For a day and a half, we listened to her describe being abused. She said that she’d been cursed at, slapped, kicked, threatened and finally robbed at knifepoint and beaten up in public by a man she loved and willingly followed from home to home. She described a rape by her then-boyfriend: “I kept saying, ‘I don’t wanna have no sex.’” I looked left and right, at jurors number 9 and 11, trying not to make eye contact. I wondered what they were thinking.

I’d started jury duty in lower Manhattan the Monday after Father’s Day. Over lemonade and burgers, I’d rehearsed with my family every line I could use to avoid serving—“Any government that would send my peers to an unjustified conflict overseas,” went one favorite, “does not deserve my participation.” My voir dire would be my bully pulpit, a chance to proclaim my dissent in ringing tones, overheard and applauded by dozens of Manhattanites. Plus, I wanted to get out early and buy cheap earrings from the vendors on Canal Street.

But then my dad looked at me: “Yeah, good idea. Bow out and leave the decisions to the complacent conservatives.”

I was chagrined—it was Father’s Day, after all—and I decided to be more open to the possibility of serving on a jury. Sure enough, after a day and a half of waiting at the courthouse I was called in for a domestic abuse panel. The courtroom, the judge in his robes, the defendant consulting with his lawyer, even the bailiffs with their not-so-inconspicuous weapons, awed me. “I should do this,” I thought.

The System, it seemed, agreed. At 5 p.m. that day, I was no longer a shleppy college student spending a week at home with my parents. I was juror number 10 in the case of People of New York v. Saul Gomez—I sat in the box with a street preacher, a doorman, the teapot from Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast, a Princeton Ph.D student and sundry others. I couldn’t help grinning.

But when the district attorney looked at us as he uttered the words “ladies and gentleman of the jury,” my grin was gone. This wasn’t “Law and Order.” In the next days, we listened to Ariane, police officers, her mother and sister, several other minor witnesses and, finally, her ex-boyfriend, the defendant. Saul told us that he had never hit his girlfriend (except for the time that there were witnesses) and that her testimony was made up because she had caught him sleeping with another woman. He was calm and smooth and made every effort to appear earnest, and I didn’t trust him for an instant. I didn’t much trust Ariane either—but I was sure she wasn’t making up her story.

Spending the morning listening to that story—of a man who controlled his girlfriend by hitting her and saying, “You like to get slapped and fucked at the same time, don’t you?”—and then going to dinner with my boyfriend’s family at a lovely Italian restaurant was like having emotional jet-lag. My life was now divided in two, one half normal and bourgeois, the other entirely invested in the drama unfolding in court: Ariane on one end, Saul on the other, along with the smooth-talking defense lawyer and the solemn district attorney.

Because of the injunction against speaking even to each other about the case, the jurors participated in this strange duality together. We sampled eateries in Tribeca and Little Italy during our lunch break, reminding me of how obsessed New Yorkers are with restaurants, then we went back into Ariane and Saul’s story.

As deliberations began I had no clue what would happen. What if everyone in the jury thought Ariane was lying? Would I have the guts to stand up to them and say I believed her? I was particularly nervous about Melina, a blonde, perfectly-attired lawyer and mother of an infant—a driving force behind the gourmet lunches. At one point, Melina made an offhand comment about one of the witnesses being “full of shit” that seemed to mark her as my future nemesis.

Our foreperson was Brenda, a born-again Christian street preacher with whom I’d gotten friendly chatting about Harriet Beecher Stowe. Once deliberations started, she alone said she thought Ariane’s testimony was fabricated. I felt betrayed; how could she? I noticed a note she had written to herself: “I was the only [juror in the pool] who confessed faith in Christ.” I almost went crazy. This woman, with her unshakable faith, was going to hang the jury.

But within five minutes, the rest of the jurors convinced her that we had clear evidence (tape-recorded phone calls) to convict the defendant of stalking. “Well,” she said, “I guess he’s guilty.” We looked at each other in amazement. One count down, four to go.

The following day, we were sequestered from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Bathrooms were attached to the jury room, and lunch was brought by the bailiffs. We argued, and argued. Was there actually a robbery, or was she accusing him out of revenge? Like the English concentrator I am, I continually returned to close reading of the “text”—that is, the tape of the phone calls—to insist that it showed evidence of premeditated violence and intimidation, not of rage at being falsely accused. In this, Melina turned out to be my biggest ally. We were like sisters in combat, and I suddenly adored her.

Though most jurors thought there had been abusive incidents, many were reluctant to dismiss their doubts. But each was a tough, rational New Yorker through and through, determined to stick it out until we reached the right verdict. After a while we cajoled the bailiffs into getting us coffee and cookies, and at some point that afternoon, we agreed that there had been a robbery, but that we didn’t have enough evidence to convict on the two weapons charges (though some of us grumbled at that). Four counts down, one to go.

The last count, which we turned to at the end of the day, was endangering the welfare of a child—Ariane’s little sister, who’d witnessed the robbery. By this point we were grumpy and uncomfortable. We didn’t understand the wording of the law. It was a tacked-on charge, guaranteed not to affect the sentence. But no one wanted to back down. Arguments reached a fever pitch, and suddenly came a sharp rap on the door: Time to break for the day. The jury groaned, unanimously.

On our third day of deliberations, Mike, the doorman—who was tall and at least 300 pounds—helped seal the case. “Whether he had a knife or not,” he said, “if he took the stuff from Ariane he must have scared the shit out of her. If he scared the shit out of her, he must have scared the shit out of her sister.” Twenty minutes later we had our verdict.

As we relaxed, even laughed, I heard some horror stories about New York City cops and abusive relationships, and I was amazed at the depth of experience around me. Mike summed it up. “I avoided jury duty so many times I got a noncompliance,” he said. “But I’m glad I did this. I learned a lot from you guys.” I wanted to cheer, cry, shake everyone’s hands. Go, Justice, Go! I thought.

Serving on the jury changed my life. I could do a sociological study on the race, gender and sexual orientation of the jurors and how it played out during deliberations; I could rant about how important a good lawyer and judge are for justice to work, or muse on how my impressions of the jurors changed when we started deliberating.

But instead, I’ll just say this: Nobody on my jury was there for money, “getting ahead” or fame. All the 12 of us wanted was to do the best job we could because we were entrusted with it, because other people’s lives were on the line. On a microcosmic level, I saw something like utopia: people stopping their busy lives to serve justice, and doing so with good faith and good results. It’s a phenomenon I never see at Harvard, or in national politics or waiting in line. But now I’ve seen it. I walked out of court just that much less jaded.

Sarah M. Seltzer ’05, an English and American language and literature concentrator affiliated with Lowell House, is the editor of Fifteen Minutes, The Crimson’s weekend magazine. She urges all would-be criminals to watch out, ’cause justice has a new face.