by Angela Starita
In October, I received a jury summons for Kings County Supreme Court. The first day—exactly two weeks before the presidential election—lawyers vetted potential jurors for a case made against the defendant, David Cruz, who was on trial for second-degree murder and related gun charges. Looking down at my hands when the charges were announced, I had to consciously take in the severity of the case since, of course, the judge had taken a dispassionate tone, the same one he might have used in a civil trial around a sidewalk fall or a landlord withholding heat. I immediately began dreading the possibility of being on the jury, fearing an ambiguous case with vindictive or thoughtless jurors. With an hour to go before dismissal, the lawyers choose me to serve. The judge told the 17 of us to return the following Monday, the day the trial would begin.
I spent the week trying to stop myself from imagining possible scenarios. I met up with a friend whose mother, a smart, generous woman who like most of her family loved Donald Trump, was dying of lung cancer. At the end of the evening, I told my friend my fears about jury duty, possibly jailing the wrong person, and even jailing the right person considering the state of our prison system. Though I hadn’t named the crime, he assumed murder and then stood over me and said, “Well, you’re just better than the rest of us. I guess you’re ready for your robes and sandals.”
Like the rest of his family, my friend is witty, quick with a comeback, and much of our closeness rests on my appreciation of his humor. So standing there on that subway platform, I wondered if he were joking. I said nothing, not quite sure what had just transpired. He took a step back looked worried, then asked what was wrong. Not yet sure what had happened, I made some sort of excuse for going still. Another beat passed, and then he stepped close again and made another holier-than-thou crack. This time, it was clear there was no humor intended.
To be fair, he was drunk and exhausted after months of worry about his mother. At the same time, his wife has been searching for work, and he really couldn’t see how he could build a reasonable future for his son with only one income. His stress was palpable.
When the trial began the following week, the assistant district attorney, a nervous young woman wearing a black suit jacket, a matching short skirt, and four-inch heels laid out the events of the case as she saw them: a group of men heading towards a cookout on Memorial Day Weekend encounter three other men with whom they exchange hostilities. The first group eventually decides to forsake the cookout and head home. On their way back to the subway, two of them are shot, one fatally. The shooter, she contended, was the defendant. The defense attorney, far more confident, very tanned and wearing loafers and patterned socks, said only that the crime was an awful one, but the police had the wrong man. Cruz himself wore wire-rimmed glasses, two neat braids, and pastel button-downs—a prisoner dressed for court. In a photo taken the day he was arrested six years ago, he looks small and frightened. He’s a muscular man now.
Over the next days, the prosecutor brought in a parade of experts on guns, DNA, and autopsies. She also provided CCT video of the crime, several times showing it edited with circles, arrows, and photos of the defendant next to stills of the shooter. Incredibly, the defense attorney didn’t bother to object or even remind the jury that the photo was added at the behest of the prosecution.
On that first day I found that, much to my relief, I’d been made an alternate juror. There were five of us, and we sat in the jury box during the trial and spent our days in a room with the active jurors. Though most of us kept to ourselves, there were some standouts who wanted to socialize like the elderly NYC Parks employee later nicknamed Bike Man because his locked bicycle had been stolen the first day at court. He talked about his plans to retire in Cuba in a few years and one day came to court wearing a tee shirt with a quotation from Rumi about justice: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The other talkative juror was Godfrey, a young, ebullient bus driver, who claimed that some express bus drivers use their 7-hour layovers to visit mistresses and even had started whole second families. Another juror, Doris was a retiree who wore a turban and had trained to be an election worker. She was curious about Bike Man’s extensive travels and when we were released early one afternoon, she went to Manhattan to visit Vanderbilt One, a fairly new high rise with a city viewing platform. One morning she said she wanted to lead us in prayer. While I was irritated that a public space became a forum for Christian prayer, I was grateful to Doris because her she began with a sober reminder that “a young man’s life is in our hands.” I also said a private prayer each day as we entered the courtroom, asking for wisdom, though what I really wanted was enough doubt to find Cruz not guilty.
I knew this wasn’t a fair way to go into the case. I took the judge’s edict seriously and tried hard to stick to the evidence. But it was work trying to imagine the victim, William Perez, a 20-year-old man whose sister’s testimony was read by the prosecutor, revealing only that he had a job and was in East New York the night of his death to attend a cookout. That was all. For me, William Perez remained a fuzzy figure in a video, shot at close range and then lying dead in the street for minutes before anyone dared approach his body. Intellectually, I found the scene horrifying; emotionally, I cared most about the living man in front of me. No matter how much I tried, Perez remained an abstraction.
During the trial, three people sat on the benches behind the defense, people I assumed to be Cruz’s relatives or friends since, during lunch outside of the courthouse, you would see them walking with his lawyer. But it also occurred to me that they might have gone to that side automatically, following the convention of weddings, sitting on the side of the person you know. No one sat on Perez’s side over the course of those two weeks, except for a young man who arrived one afternoon just as we were being dismissed. He never returned. Even now that I’m permitted to research the case, I can find nothing about the victim.
The day after elections, each side gave their closing arguments, and the alternates were put in a separate room while the jurors deliberated. We could hear the three hard knocks of the court officer as he delivered clarifications for their many questions. Meanwhile I spent the days trying to get work done but with constant interruptions from a fellow alternate, a 4th grade teacher who wanted us to know that she had stayed up until 3 AM to hear Trump speak. “It’s not all about abortion, you know.” This she said to no one in particular. She went on to complain about her high bills and the cost of rent, the ways her children sometimes turned to her for money even though they were adults. She was clearly dedicated to her students—they were her other topic of conversation—and on the second day, she bemoaned the “way politicians talk,” citing them as awful role models for kids. When I pointed out that Trump’s one great talent is the skilled crafting of personal insults, she said Harris was equally guilty. Two of my fellow alternates agreed with her and took refuge in the “no good politician” bromide.
How could she not make the obvious connection between Trump’s venomous rhetoric, his promises to dismantle or deregulate a host of agencies including the Department of Education, and her students? Did it require too many abstract jumps to imagine how people she loved might suffer under his administration and for years after? Was the word “might” too weak in the face of her mounting bills?
The jurors came to their decision. We marched into the courtroom, and they pronounced David Cruz guilty on all three counts. Afterwards, I spoke to some of them, and it was obvious they’d considered the case with a lot of care and integrity. In the end, one man told me they couldn’t honestly find reasonable doubt. “We wanted to, but we couldn’t.” I tried to comfort Doris, who said, “We also have to remember the young man who died.”