A Trial by Jury by D. Graham Burnett

Author:D. Graham Burnett [Burnett, D. Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Murder, Jury, Social Science, Criminal Law, True Crime, Law Enforcement, General, Legal History, Civil Procedure, Political Science, Law, Criminology
ISBN: 9780375413032
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2001-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

7. The Second Day

Thursday morning, at the hotel’s buffet breakfast, I sat next to Dean, who was manfully consuming a heaping plate of sausage and eggs. My own plate was empty, since I had eaten fruit and bread in my room. Conversation turned from my abstemious table habits to Vel’s ubiquitous book on fasting, to the approach of Lent, to the love of God.

The more I talked to Dean, the more interesting he seemed. Not only, we were learning, was he a born-again Christian former crystal-meth addict (a habit he had picked up in the engine room of a navy aircraft carrier), but he was also a modern domestic missionary, who had been sent by his California “mother church” (of recovered addicts) as part of a small cell charged to found a new community in the drug-addled world of Spanish Harlem. Almost a decade had passed since this group had arrived (none of the faithful ever having seen New York City) and taken up residence in a communal apartment, living on resources pooled from odd jobs. No full-time work, because they needed to leave plenty of time for prayer, and for their mission: wandering in and out of the heroin galleries and the crack dens of the neighborhood, handing out literature, praising the Lord, preaching the possibility of recovery and redemption. They held their first meetings in an empty storefront, circling in prayer around vomiting addicts delirious from the struggle to go cold-turkey. The church now boasted well over one hundred families, and Dean had become one of its leaders, a deacon sometimes called upon to preach. He had married into the community, and he and his Guatemalan wife had two kids of their own; they were also raising Dean’s daughter from a previous marriage—the mother’s addiction had cost her first custody, then her life.

All this was by no means the c.v. I had imagined for Dean, but it explained much: his accommodating and gentle voice in our deliberations; his obvious ability to speak with authority and lead the group; his sympathy (contrary to my initial suspicions) for the defendant. From the beginning, Dean’s attitude was that Milcray had done the wrong thing, that he had almost certainly gotten involved in something risky and stupid, but that this alone was not grounds for a conviction.

“The Lord knows,” he would add, “I myself have been in the wrong place more than once.”

One time the wrong place involved a horrendous van wreck (linked to a meth binge and a Hell’s Angels syndicate) that had left him with an ax wound in the neck and a steel plate in his spine. He set off the metal detector at the court entrance.

Back in the jury room that morning, after a slow bus ride through the rush-hour traffic, we went over the meaning of the judge’s answers. His having said that we had to consider the charges in order sealed most people’s sense that we had to reach unanimity on a single charge before we could go on to think about the self-defense issue.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.