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Words that scream for your submission and no-one’s jamming their transmission

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“We have seen that in order to do that violence safely and effectively, responsibility for the violence must be shared; law must operate as a system of cues and signals to many actors who would otherwise be unwilling, incapable or irresponsible in their violent acts. This social organization of violence manifests itself in the secondary rules and principles which generally ensure that no single mind and no single will can generate the violent outcomes that follow from interpretive commitments. No single individual can render any interpretation operative as law-as authority for the violent act.” –Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word”

Seth Stevenson has an extraordinary essay about being a member of a jury that convicted an African-American man who was 17 at the time of the alleged crime of a murder he almost certainly didn’t commit and was only very peripherally involved with, resulting in a sentence of 46 years-to-life. It really should be read in full, but a teaser:

Our first group decision was to elect a foreman. Looking back, the pick seems preordained: We chose the most confident white man in the room. He’d lobbied for the job.

As we began to proffer our half-formed thoughts about guilt and innocence, I discovered to my relief that many jurors sided with me: Maurice was dead to rights, Dominic was a knottier problem. But I remember our foreman very quickly stepping in to ask if we even needed to figure out which defendant had pulled a trigger. According to the judge’s instructions about aiding and abetting, it was enough merely to know that a trigger had been pulled, with both men present and in some sort of cahoots, and—per the language the judge had read to us—that the pulling of the trigger had been a “natural and probable consequence” of those cahoots.

I remember that a woman on the jury—the blonde in her 30s, an attorney, whom I saw as half of the room’s power duo—took up whatever conversational space the foreman left unclaimed. She made it clear she had zero doubt that we were required to find both defendants guilty. Other jurors seemed as though they would have preferred to reject the aiding and abetting case against Dominic, but they couldn’t out-debate the leaders in the room. Members of the pro-Dominic faction would sigh, or shake their heads. They’d start to pose a question, but then have trouble formulating it. One by one, they all came around to guilty.

This manifestly unjust and yet legally permissible outcome isn’t just about this jury’s inversion of 12 Angry Men, of course, but about legislators who make “felony murder” an offense comparable to actual murder,* prosecutors abusing their discretion, etc. But the view from inside the jury and the aftermath of an unnecessarily ruined life is remarkable.

*as Denverite observes in comments, in this case it was actually the “aiding and abetting” law that produced the outcome in this case.  As Stevenson observes, the doctrine the D.C. courts were commonly applying at the time — which would have made it at least on the borderline of jury nullification to find Dominic innocent given the instructions — has been overruled: there is now a mens rea requirement, but too late to help Dominic.

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