Trials & Tribulations

I sent a man to jail this week.

I got stuck on jury duty and ended up being selected to serve on a trial. Sure, I contemplated pretending to be an angry racist or mildly retarded to get out of it, but I couldn't quite bring myself to say "I think black people are cannibals" in any kind of convincing manner.

The charge in this trial was "Possession of a Fradulent Instrument in the Second Degree," and it was just as boring as it sounds. Basically, the defendant "bent" Metrocards. It's a badly kept secret that when a Metrocard runs out of money, you can bend it in a certain place on its magnetic strip to trick the turnstile computer into giving you one more free ride. Poor entrepreneurial types pick up discarded cards, bend them, and sell "swipes" to subway riders for a dollar.

This...is illegal. Well, posessing the "bent" cards is illegal. Illegal enough to warrant a 4-day trial with jury. And this defendant was caught with 14 of these cards. Which means your tax payer dollars were spent on a trial to convict a man conducting a scam that could have netted him a whopping 14 bucks.

Pretty sad. "But sympathy can not be a part of your deliberations," said our matronly judge over and over again. She also liked to make a joke about how we were not supposed to talk to the press "though I do not expect the press to be covering this trial...*chuckle*."

All of the people involved in this case were straight out of central casting:

--The matronly judge with 1960s hairstyle

--The driven but stiff, blonde Assistant D.A. in the too-tight skirt-and-jacket set

--The schlubby, hulking, and balding Jewish defense attorney in an array of non-tailored suits

--The hip, young, black cop strutting in with his badge on a chain around his neck

--The exhausted, middle-aged hispanic arresting officer who's been locked in the transit beat for way too long and probably isn't getting out

--The MTA Metrocard expert - eccentric mathematician/statistician - far too comfortable and clever on the stand - oh yeah, and his left hand was deformed

--The Booth Clerk - white hair, beer belly, not too smart, couldn't remember any of the events discussed in the trial - he worked the third shift the night before so he was half asleep and miserable

--And the defendant - a poor, misdirected black man who was eager to read his lawyer's papers through oversized drug store reading glasses and who would get visibly excited when the police officers would contradict themselves about trivial things on the stand.

They caught him with 14 "bent" metrocards in his hand and 3 dollars in his pocket. That's all. There was no doubt he was guilty. No one even tried to dispute the fact that he had the cards and that's all we were instructed to decide. So we sent him to jail.

It took us about twenty minutes to deliberate. Actually we took a vote immediately and all agreed he was guilty. Then we felt guilty for being done so quickly so we took about twenty minutes creating weak hypotheticals that could render him innocent and then shooting them down. Then we voted again - no change - and we told the judge we were done.

There were a few more minutes of waiting during which a few jurors made jokes about how we weren't going to get that free lunch paid for by the court. Then we went back into the courtroom. I could see on the defendant's face that he knew we had found him guilty. He looked defeated - like someone had made fun of him in front of his friends and he couldn't think of a comeback. It made my stomach hurt.

The jury foreperson (a sweet, middle-aged kindergarten teacher from the Upper East Side) had to stand and actually say the word "guilty." She only managed a whisper.

Then we were dismissed.