A Trial by Jury Read Online Free PDF Page A

have knowledge of this sort of research, or agree that this was possible? Two or three hands went up. Who knows what he was getting at with this line of questioning. I never understood what relevance it had to the case.
    Less pale than his adversary, the defense attorney had a slightly nasal (if not actually whiny) voice, and a tendency to lean back in his chair, legal pad on his knee, and gaze over our heads, out the window high up behind the jury box. He rose, came still closer, rested his elbows on the bar in front of the jury box. In an intimate way, sighing as if commiserating with our plight, he said slowly, “Good morning.”
    There was little reply.
    From his questions the contours of the case itself began to emerge for the first time. Did any of us think that it was impossible for a man to rape another man? Silence. Did any of us think that a man who legitimately thought he was going to be raped should not, could not, use any means at his command to protect himself? He looked at us closely. No one raised a hand.
    â€œNow,” he said suddenly, breaking his eye contact and moving away from the rail, “there were a lot of stab wounds”—sounding the last two words as if he were shrugging with his voice—“twenty-five, twenty-six stab wounds . . . and a lot of these were in the back. Are there any of you who think, right now, that it’s just
impossible,
that if you were defending yourself, and you were in a dark room, and there is this man, on top of you, trying to sodomize you—are there any of you who just say, ‘No way! There’s
no way
you could stab somebody
twenty-five times
in self-defense’?” He looked back at us, and let the question sink in.
    This was the first we heard of the wounds.
    After several seconds, a large woman in the second row, heavily made up, raised her hand. “You, you think that’s just
impossible?
” he continued. “I mean, you’re excited, you’re scared. . . .”
    She furrowed her prominent brow and thought about it, and as she did so it was clear that she was slow. But she stuck to her guns. You couldn’t put this one over on her—something was fishy about that number.
    Fair enough, I thought. But I could swallow the idea. I had seen fights where people were trying to do each other serious harm. I had even been in one or two such fights. It was hard to put a limit on what might happen under those circumstances.
    They sent us into the hall to wait. A few people chatted. I kept to myself. When we were called back into the room, it all happened very fast. The judge read five names, including mine and that of the man next to me, the white-haired gentleman with the garnet and the Rolex, Richard Chorst. I looked at him and shrugged, assuming we had been dismissed. But then the other thirteen panelists were asked to rise and follow the bailiff. And suddenly the five of us were standing, and the clerk of count was reading us the oath, and we were sworn jurors.
    I cannot remember the oath, but the clerk I see clearly: knobby, long, and mournful, his eyes furtive under bushy white brows, a desultory necktie hanging loosely at the collar of his worn-thin dress shirt—Thomas Mackelwee, associate clerk of count. He would sit at his desk in the corner of the courtroom as the trial wore on, dozing sometimes, quietly reading the
Post,
which he laid unobtrusively flat over his papers, getting up to swear in witnesses in his deferential mumble. Once, he was called on by the judge to give the dimensions of the courtroom in yards, to help a witness specify a key distance estimate in his testimony. Thomas Mackelwee was deep asleep. Uncharacteristically, the judge did not lose his temper. He paused, looked up, and called for a recess. Some people chuckled, but he did not.
    Thomas and the judge were two old, old men; one sensed they had worked together for a long time.
    One afternoon Thomas approached