A Trial by Jury Read Online Free PDF Page B

court!” as the metal door swings open; faces turn to observe. For the first time we see the victim’s family, arranged in the penultimate row of the courtroom, on the prosecutor’s side. When we are assembled, Richard Chorst, the neat gentleman with the garnet ring, gets placed in the first seat, with me on his left. He sits upright, his hands folded in his lap. He, the judge explains, will be our foreman.
    â€œAre these jurors satisfactory to the people?” the judge asks the prosecutor, and he replies, without looking at us, “Satisfactory to the people.” “And to the defense?” The answer comes, a pinched voice, as the lawyer shuffles files: “Yes, your honor.”
    And we begin.

3. The Defendant
    F rom the first moments of the prosecution’s opening statement, the strange nature of the proceedings made a deep impression. How did it happen, I wondered, that a practice of truth-seeking had evolved to divide the job up in all these curious ways? The asking of questions was reserved to those who would play no role in judging the answers, while we, the jury, who were supposed to try to figure out what had gone on, had to remain absolutely silent. And though it was up to us to decide if the defendant was guilty, we would have no part in determining the consequences of that decision: the business of setting punishments was reserved to the judge; we wouldn’t even know what they might be. (Although, later, during a suspension in our deliberations, when we were held temporarily in an empty courtroom under loose guard, one of us milling around the vacant bench found a judge’s laminated sheet of “sentencing guidelines”; thus we learned what would happen to Milcray if we convicted—he could go to prison for life.)
    Our enforced silence was the most difficult thing. How could one even begin to investigate a problem without being able to engage with it directly? We were allowed no paper or writing implements. I fidgeted like a monkey.
    The prosecution’s first witness was Antigua’s sister—catatonic, blank, her thick West Indian accent clipping her monosyllabic answers.
    â€œAnd did you go to the morgue with the police?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd did they show you the body at that time?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd did you recognize the body?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd was it the body of Randolph Cuffee, ‘Antigua,’ your brother?”
    â€œIt was me broth’r,” she said, beginning to sob in stoic stillness.
    â€œAnd what did you say?”
    The judge cut off this question: “It is not relevant what she said,” he announced irritably. “Next question . . .”
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    M y way up Centre Street in the evening takes me past the adjacent jail, linked by a bridge of sighs to the court building itself. I step aside to let one of the repainted school buses of the Corrections Department back into the loading dock. It pings insistently and has windows of metal mesh. Milcray may ride in one of these. He may be held in the jail at night. We are not told.
    Paused, I notice an interesting architectural detail on the building: the squared-off columns posed decoratively around its base are constructed of wire, as if they were the armature of a plaster sculpture. Harmless enough, modernist, and not unattractive. But, looking more closely, I see this means that these columns, set before the jailhouse, appear to be composed of stacks of little barred cells. I sense a tendentious architect slipping a caustic commentary past his clients: the traditional elegant white columns of the classical orders (those symbols of justice, and props to the pediment of the republic), stripped bare, reveal a carceral skeleton. Unnerving.
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    A fter police discovered the body of Randolph Cuffee, they followed standard procedures in the investigation of a stabbing death: they canvassed New York–area hospitals for patients