Word: juror
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Others who oppose cameras insist that juror privacy is essential to the sanctity of the process. Cameras, they say, will skew the composition of juries by removing people who don't want to deliberate in front of them. And jurors who don't feel articulate or confident may be reluctant to speak out or take an unpopular stand--as Henry Fonda did in the classic movie 12 Angry Men--if they think their neighbors are watching and judging them. Furthermore, recording jury deliberations, opponents say, might encourage litigation and prolong what some feel is the already cumbersome process of appeals...
...check-in time at the district courthouse, I secretly looked forward to fulfilling my civic obligation. My enthusiasm was fueled by a pamphlet, the “Trial Juror’s Handbook,” that explained the importance of jury service. “As a juror, you will have to make difficult judgements [sic] involving all of the human passions—love, hate, greed, anger, etc.,” the Handbook promised, and accordingly I imagined a courtroom drama with the pageantry and carefully enumerated sins of a medieval morality play. “Remember that...
...actual jury experience was more disappointing still: I checked in and was directed to the jury pool room, where I sat with a couple dozen other people, most of them elderly. We watched television for a while, and then a movie about being a juror, which had poor production values and featured Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall. Then we watched television for another hour, my fellow jurors cackling disturbingly at Regis and Kelly’s repartee, before the judge came in and told us that since both cases on the docket had been settled, we might...
...testify. Yet the jury chose to believe the testimony of these men, some with long criminal records, over the evidence given by police colleagues of the accused officers. Jury questions to the judge indicated a high degree of skepticism over police witnesses' repeated lapses of memory, with a juror asking whether this was the infamous "code of silence" practiced by the police...
Reporters quickly began searching for other evidence that Bush might have given misleading answers about the arrest. When he was called for jury duty in 1996, Bush did not answer a question on a juror questionnaire about whether he had been involved in a previous criminal case. The Bush campaign says the form was filled out by an aide, who also did not answer several other questions. And there were suggestions in some press reports that when Bush got a new driver's license, with the number 00000005, after he became Governor in 1995, his intent might have been...