Sudden thought watching the baseball hearings: is the guy sitting to Canseco’s right (our left) his lawyer? If so, Jose found the one lawyer in America with a bigger neck than his own. Can we schedule hearings about Lawyers on Steroids?
But seriously, it is de rigeur today to denigrate the Robert Blake jury. Like everyone else outside the courtroom, I found the “She was shot while I rushed into the restaurant to retrieve my gun” defense almost Twinkily shaky. But two things give me pause before deriding this or any jury. One, I was in the jury pool for the Robert Blake trial. True story. Me and Christina Applegate. Still not kidding. One very long day hanging around the courthouse–“Bring a book” is the mantra for jury duty, JD is probably the only thing keeping the publishing industry from going totally under–and the cognitive dissonance between the video assuring us what an important job we’re doing and the nature of the treatment we’re receiving (as the lowest-paid cogs of the criminal-justice machine) all incline me toward great respect for the people who actually end up serving.
The second thing that keeps me from knee-jerk juror derision was the memory of how cruel we all were toward the O.J. Simpson criminal trial jury. “They only took five hours to deliberate!” was the angry mantra of the time. (Hint: how many hours did the jury in the–pardon me for mentioning something truly trivial, given its prominence in the cable-news universe–Scott Peterson trial deliberate?) But my experience covering the subsequent civil trial brought me to another conclusion: both juries were right. We civilians sometimes forget, but jurors tend to take seriously, the weight of the burden that is wisely placed upon the prosecution to prove something–even something obvious, like OJ’s guilt–beyond a reasonable doubt. Would that more highly-paid parts of our government took their legal and Constitutional responsibilities as seriously….
