Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

Odette and I move closer for the conference as a noise machine is turned on so that the rest of the jury cannot hear what this guy says. He points to Odette. “She locked up my brother on a drug charge, and she’s a lying bitch.”

Needless to say, he’s excused.

After a few more blanket queries, the judge smiles at the group. “All right, folks. I’m going to excuse you, and the bailiff will take you to the jury lounge. We’ll be calling you in one at a time so that the counselors can ask some individual follow-ups. Please don’t talk about your experiences with your fellow jurors. As I told you, the State has the burden of proof. We haven’t started to take evidence yet, so I urge you to keep an open mind and to be honest with your answers in front of the court. We want to make sure you are comfortable sitting as a juror in this case, just as the parties involved have the right to feel that their process can be judged by someone fair and impartial.”

If only the judge were the same, I think.

Voir dire is a cocktail party without any booze. You want to schmooze your jurors, you want them to like you. You want to act interested in their careers, even if that career is quality control at a Vaseline plant. As each individual juror is paraded before you, you rate him or her. A perfect juror is a 5. A bad juror is a 1.

Howard will list the reasons that a juror isn’t acceptable, so we can keep them straight. Ultimately we’ll wind up taking 3s and 4s and 5s, because we have only seven peremptory strikes we can use to kick a juror out of the pool without having to give a reason. And we don’t want to use those all up at once, because what if there’s a bigger problem juror yet to come?

The first man to take the stand is Derrick Welsh. He’s fifty-eight and has bad teeth and is wearing an untucked plaid shirt. Odette greets him with a smile. “Mr. Welsh, how are you doing today?”

“All right I guess. A little hungry.”

She smiles. “Me too. Tell me, have we ever worked on any cases together?”

“No,” he says.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Welsh?”

“I run a hardware store.”

She asks him about his children and their ages. Howard taps me on the shoulder. He’s been frantically sifting through the surveys. “This is the one whose brother is a cop,” he whispers.

“I read The Wall Street Journal, ” Welsh is saying, when I turn back. “And Harlan Coben.”

“Have you heard about this case?”

“A little bit. On the news,” he admits. “I know the nurse was accused of killing a baby.”

Beside me, Ruth flinches.

“Do you have any opinion about whether the defendant is guilty of that offense?” Odette asks.

“As far as I know, in our country everyone’s innocent till they’re proven guilty.”

“How do you see your role as a juror?”

He shrugs. “I guess listen to evidence…and do what the judge says.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Odette says, and she sits down.

I rise from my seat. “Hi there, Mr. Welsh,” I say. “You have a relative in law enforcement, don’t you?”

“My brother is a police officer.”

“Does he work in this community?”

“For fifteen years,” the juror replies.

“Does he ever tell you about his job? What kinds of people he deals with?”

“Sometimes…”

“Has your store ever been vandalized?”

“We were robbed once.”

“Do you think the increase in crime is due to an influx of minorities in the community?

He considers this. “I think it has more to do with the economy. People lose jobs, they get desperate.”

“Who do you think has the right to dictate medical treatment-the family of the patient or the medical professional?” I ask.

“It’s a case-by-case thing…”

“Have you or someone in your family had a bad outcome at a hospital?”

Walsh’s mouth tightens. “My mother died on the operating table during a routine endoscopy.”

“Did you blame the doctor?”

He hesitates. “We settled.”

And a flag is on the field . “Thank you,” I say, and as I sit down I look at Howard and shake my head.

The second potential juror is a black man in his late sixties. Odette asks him how far he went in school, if he is married, who he lives with, what his hobbies are. Most of these questions are on the survey, but sometimes you want to ask them again, to look the person in the eye when he tells you he does Civil War reenactments, for example, to see if he’s just into history or if he’s a gun nut. “I understand you’re a security guard at a mall,” she says. “Do you consider yourself a member of law enforcement?”

“I guess in a small sense,” he replies.

“Mr. Jordan, you know we’re looking for an impartial jury,” Odette says. “It surely has not escaped your notice that you and the defendant are both people of color. Might that impact your ability to make a fair decision?”

He blinks. After a moment, he replies to Odette, “Is there anything about your color that makes you unfair?”

I think Mr. Jordan might be my favorite person in the world right now. I stand up as Odette finishes her questioning. “Do you think black people are more likely to commit crimes than white people?” I ask.

I already know the answer, so that’s not why I’m asking.

I want to see how he reacts to me, a white woman, posing a question like that.

“I believe,” he says slowly, “that black people are more likely to wind up in jail than white folks.”

“Thank you, sir,” I say, and I turn toward Howard, nodding imperceptibly, as if to say: That is a ten.

There are several witnesses who fall somewhere in between horrific and perfect, and then juror number 12 takes the stand. Lila Fairclough is the perfect age for a juror, blond and spry. She teaches in the inner city in a racially integrated classroom. She’s very polite and professional with Odette, but she smiles at me the minute I stand up. “My daughter’s going to be in the school district where you work,” I tell her. “It’s why we moved there.”

“She’ll love it,” the woman says.

“Now, here I am, Ms. Fairclough, a white woman representing a black woman, who’s facing one of the most serious accusations that can be brought against a person. I have some concerns, and I’d like to talk about them, because it’s just as critical for you to feel comfortable on this jury as it is for me to feel comfortable representing my client. You know, we all talk about prejudice being a bad thing, but it’s a reality. For example, there are certain kinds of cases I could never be impaneled on. I mean, I love animals. If I see someone being cruel to them I can’t be objective-I’m just so angry that my anger supersedes any rational thought. If that was the case, I’d have a hard time believing anything the defense told me.”

“I totally get your point, but I don’t have a biased bone in my body,” Ms. Fairclough assures me.

“If you got on the bus and there were two seats available-one next to an African American man and one next to an elderly white woman, where would you sit?”

“In the first available seat.” She shakes her head. “I know what you’re getting at, Ms. McQuarrie. But honestly, I don’t have a problem with black people.”

That’s when Howard drops his pen.

I hear it like a gunshot. I spin around, meet his eye, and start to fake an Oscar-worthy coughing fit. This was our prearranged signal. I choke as if I am hacking out a lung, and drink from the glass of water on the defense table, and then rasp at the judge, “My colleague will finish up here, Your Honor.”

When Howard stands up, he starts swallowing convulsively. I’m sure that the judge is going to think the entire defense team has the plague, when I see the reaction on Lila Fairclough’s face.