An Allegory for Life?
I had jury duty this week. If this is typical of the state of our criminal justice system, may God have mercy on us. The trial is over; I am permitted to talk about it, so here’s a distillation of the whole body of testimony.
The defendant was an inmate at a minimum security prison in Colorado, and nearing his release date. He admitted to smuggling raw pizza dough and sugar (yeast and sugar ferment nicely) out of the kitchen in his shoes. As the story begins, two guards are alerted that an inmate appears to be acting as a lookout outside one of the cells (think dormitory room). One guard arrives a few moments before the other, enters the room, and finds three inmates along with the ingredients and paraphernalia to brew ‘hooch’, jailhouse beer. In fact two batches are in process. Being outnumbered, the guard felt insecure, and ordered everyone out of the room. The guard never bothered to take names. There are no cameras. As it turned out, only one inmate in the room actually lived there, the others were described as a “bald white guy with tattoos,” thus describing roughly half the prison population, and a “little Mexican dude,” thus describing roughly the other half. No one was about to identify either of these individuals. The contraband was confiscated, but not fingerprinted. Pictures of the contraband were taken, but not in their original context.
Two days later a state investigator bearing a considerable resemblance to James Gandolfini who portrays Tony Soprano on the HBO series, shows up. He takes two samples of the hooch, one from each batch–he assumes, but cannot be positive because he took no notes–puts each sample in a plastic bottle of the sort the druggist uses for your prescriptions, and destroys the rest. He then takes the samples to the state laboratory where they sit for two months, fermenting away. Oddly, the bottles leaked under the pressure of fermentation, and cross-contaminated. When, after two months, the lab tested the samples, lo and behold, they contained an unspecified percentage of alcohol.
In the meantime, there is an ongoing effort to determine who was in, or near, the erstwhile brewery. Three men are identified, the one that lives there, the lookout, and one other. These are confined in a separate lockup, and questioned. The bald, tattooed white man and the small gentleman of Latin ancestry were never identified. If the numbers don’t quite add up for you, you’re in good company. The resident of the brewery (the defendant in this case) saw his duty under the inmates’ unwritten, but vigorously enforced, code of conduct. He confessed that all the contraband was his, and no one else was involved. No one made any record of his confession, let alone asked him to sign anything.
The defendant is charged with one count of introducing contraband. The count specifically charged him with making alcohol. Twelve members of a jury of his peers concluded that he clearly pinched ingredients to make hooch, and knew what was going on in his room. They heard no evidence whatsoever that he actually made anything. Absent the possibility of convicting him of conspiracy, complicity, or as an accessory, we acquitted him.
On the one hand, the defendant skated. He was guilty of several things, none of which were in the indictment. The state failed to prove the one thing for which they charged him because the officers had unconscionable lapses in regular police procedure. (If you want to write, sooner or later you have to learn this stuff)
On the other hand, the defendant was looking at one to three additional years for trying to brew a little beer. The other two had their wrists slapped. We, of course, didn’t know what the potential sentence might have been during deliberations, but felt a little better about the justice of our decision after we heard.
All of this cost money, lots of it. It cost the taxpayers of course, but it cost almost 50 citizens a day’s work, and 13 of us two day’s. Someone had to find a substitute for the English teacher whose students were working on a major project. The coal mine had to schedule around the absence of one of its foremen. The commissioned salesman earned no commission. The night waitress worked double shifts. We all did our duty with seriousness, and remarkable sense of cheerfulness, but nothing substantive was accomplished. It may be an allegory for life-I truly hope not. I have higher expectations of life.