What the Jury Carries
| 16 min read
The compound had a chemical name that nobody used and a trade name that everybody did, and the trade name was Witness.
Vera Okafor received her summons the way she received all obligations she could not refuse, with a resigned and orderly dread. She had served on a jury once before, years ago, back when serving meant sitting in a box and listening to people talk and then arguing in a stuffy room until twelve tired adults agreed on something they could all live with. That was before Witness. The pamphlet that arrived with her summons explained, in the flat reassuring prose of institutions, that the process had changed, and that jurors in criminal trials would now be asked to undergo empathic administration as part of their duty, and that the procedure was safe, reversible in its acute effects, and had been upheld by the higher courts. There was a phone number for those with medical exemptions. Vera did not have a medical exemption. She had a mild heart condition that fell just short of the threshold, and a strong suspicion that she did not want to know what the drug did, and neither of these was on the list.
She read what she could find about it in the weeks before the trial, because not knowing frightened her more than knowing. Witness did not manufacture emotion out of nothing. It did something stranger and more specific. When a person under its influence was played another person's recorded testimony, delivered in that person's own voice, describing an experience in the first person, the drug bound the listener's emotional apparatus to the account. You did not merely hear that the witness had been afraid. You were afraid, with their fear, in the shape and weight and duration of it, as though the memory had been decanted out of one skull and poured into yours. The effect faded over hours. What it left behind, the studies were careful and evasive about, and the carefulness told Vera more than the words did. It left something behind. Everyone agreed it left something behind. They disagreed only about how much, and for how long, and whether that was a flaw in the instrument or the entire point of it.
The reasoning behind adopting it had been humane, or had been sold as humane, which Vera had learned were not always the same thing. Courts had always struggled with the gap between knowing and understanding. A juror could be told that a victim suffered and could nod and file the suffering under fact and go home unchanged, and verdicts, the reformers argued, reflected that distance, that comfortable ignorance of what the words actually meant. Witness closed the distance. Jurors who had felt the victim's terror in their own bodies did not file it under fact. They deliberated with it still ringing in them, and they came back with verdicts that took the suffering seriously in a way the old juries never had.
The verdicts got harsher. That was the finding nobody disputed. Once the victim's account lived inside the jury, mercy became very difficult, and sentences climbed across every category of crime, and for a few years the reformers called this justice and the prosecutors called it progress. Then the defense bar went to war over it, and the argument they made was so obviously correct in hindsight that Vera could not believe it had taken years to prevail. If the jury was going to be made to feel the victim, then the jury had to be made to feel the defendant. Anything less was not empathy but a weapon, a machine for manufacturing the victim's pain and pumping it into twelve people while the person on trial remained an abstraction, a name, a body in a chair. The higher court agreed. The law now required symmetry. If the prosecution dosed the jury with the victim's account, the defense had the right to dose the jury with the defendant's, and the jury deliberated having carried both.
Vera understood the logic. She understood it the way you understand a thing that is about to happen to you and cannot be stopped, which is to say she understood it as a fate rather than an argument. She reported to the courthouse on a cold Monday, was selected over the course of two exhausting days, and took her seat in the box as juror number nine, and only then did she learn what the case was.
It was a killing. A man named Desmond Aity was accused of beating another man to death in the parking structure beneath a shopping center, and the dead man's name was Peter Vasco, and the two of them had not known each other before the night Peter Vasco died. That was the prosecution's whole theory, that Desmond had attacked a stranger without cause and killed him with his hands over the course of several minutes, and the medical evidence supported the several minutes, which was the part Vera already dreaded, because several minutes was a long time, and Witness did not compress.
The prosecution's administration came on the fourth day.
They did it in the jury room, with a physician present and a technician who moved down the row with the small pneumatic device and the sealed cartridges, and Vera felt the cold press against her arm and the faint hiss and then nothing at all for several minutes, and she began to hope, absurdly, that she was immune. Then the recording started. It was Peter Vasco's account, reconstructed from the dying man's own statements to the paramedics and the police in the twenty minutes before he lost consciousness for the last time, rendered in a synthesized approximation of his voice, first person, present tense, the way the protocol required.
She was not going to be able to describe it afterward to anyone who had not felt it, and she was not going to try. What the drug gave her was not a story about Peter Vasco's death. It was Peter Vasco's death, the interior of it, the specific texture of a specific man's final twenty minutes, and it arrived all at once and stayed. There was the first blow, which he had not understood, a confusion so total that his mind kept reaching for an explanation and finding none, a stranger's fist arriving out of an ordinary evening. There was the moment the confusion became fear, and the fear had a particular quality Vera had no words for, the fear of a person who realizes that the rules have stopped applying, that the social contract that had held his whole life had simply evaporated and left him alone with another man's violence in a concrete room where no one was coming. There was the pain, which was bad, but the pain was not the worst of it. The worst of it was the incredulity that ran underneath everything, the part of Peter Vasco that kept insisting, even at the end, that this could not be happening, that surely it would stop, that a mistake this large would surely correct itself, and it did not correct itself, and he died still waiting for it to.
Vera came back to the jury room shaking. Several of the others were weeping. One man had to be helped out and did not return that day. The physician moved among them with water and quiet words, and Vera drank the water and could not stop seeing the concrete and feeling the incredulity, that terrible reasonable insistence that this could not be real, which she now carried as though it had been her own.
The defense's administration came two days later, and Vera went into it hating Desmond Aity with a purity she had never felt toward another human being, because she had died at his hands and the dying was still in her.
She almost hoped the defense drug would fail to move her, because she did not want to stop hating him. Hating him was clean. Hating him let her be the instrument the first drug had made her, an engine of Peter Vasco's terror pointed at the man who had caused it. The technician came down the row again with the device and the cartridges, and the cold press and the hiss, and then the recording started, and it was Desmond Aity's account, reconstructed from his own statements, first person, present tense.
And Vera learned the thing the trial had been built to make her learn, which was that Desmond Aity's night had also been unbearable, and unbearable in a way that did not cancel Peter Vasco's and did not excuse it and did not fit anywhere alongside it, but simply existed, a second impossible weight set down next to the first.
Desmond Aity had a son. The son was six and had a disorder of the blood that required a treatment the family could not afford, and Desmond had spent two years in a state of continuous escalating desperation that the drug delivered into Vera whole, the particular grinding fear of a parent watching a child decline while every door he pushed on failed to open. On the night Peter Vasco died, Desmond had received a phone call in that parking structure telling him that the last option, an experimental program that had been his final hope, had rejected his son, and the account began there, in the seconds after that call, inside a man whose mind had come apart under a pressure Vera now felt from the inside and knew she could not have borne any better than he had. What happened next, in Desmond's experience of it, was not the cold predatory attack the prosecution had described. It was a detonation. Peter Vasco had said something, had bumped him or spoken to him, Desmond's account was fractured here in a way that felt not like lying but like the genuine incoherence of a mind that had stopped recording properly, and something in Desmond that had been stretched past its limit for two years simply gave way, and his hands were doing a thing before his mind had any part in it, and by the time his mind returned a man was dead on the concrete and Desmond's whole life was over too, and the horror that came off him then, the sick dawning comprehension of what his hands had done, was its own kind of dying, slower and still going.
Vera sat in the jury room with both of them inside her.
She had Peter Vasco's incredulous terror, his lonely reasonable certainty that this could not be happening, the twenty minutes of it. And she had Desmond Aity's two years of grinding parental desperation and the detonation at the end of it and the horror that followed, which had not stopped and would not stop. Both were true. That was the unbearable thing the symmetry had done to her, and she understood now why the defense bar had fought so hard for it and why the prosecutors had fought so hard against it, because a jury given only the victim would convict without difficulty, and a jury given both could not find any place to stand where one weight did not press on the other.
She had assumed, before, that feeling the defendant would make her merciful. That was the prosecutors' whole fear, that empathy for the accused would let the guilty walk. But it was not mercy that Desmond's account produced in her. It was something worse than mercy and worse than its absence. It was the knowledge that both of these men had been real, fully and equally real, each the entire center of his own unbearable night, and that the law was going to require her to act as though a number could be assigned to that, as though the two weights could be placed on a scale and a verdict read off, and she knew now that they could not, that the drug had not given her a tool for judgment but had instead destroyed the comfortable distance that made judgment possible at all.
The deliberations were the worst days of Vera's life. The twelve of them sat in the room with both accounts alive in all of them, and the arguments were not really arguments, they were people trying to find somewhere to put a thing that had no place to go. Some of them clung to the victim, because the victim was innocent and the innocence was simple, and Peter Vasco had done nothing, had simply been standing in a parking structure at the wrong moment, and nothing in Desmond's desperation changed that Peter Vasco was owed something by a world that had let him be beaten to death. Others clung to the defendant, because they had felt the two years and the detonation and knew that they themselves, under that exact pressure, could not swear they would have held, and how do you cage a man for the length of a moment his mind was not present for. Both sides were right. That was the trap. Both sides had felt the truth and both truths were whole and they did not fit together, and the law wanted a single word from them anyway.
Vera came to understand, somewhere in the third day of deliberation, that the question the court had actually put to her was not the question of Desmond Aity's guilt. The facts of what his hands had done were not in dispute. He had killed Peter Vasco. The question the court had put to her, using the drug, was which of two unbearable things she was willing to carry home and live inside for the rest of her life, because the verdict would decide that, and the drug had made sure of it. If she voted to convict on the most serious count, she would carry Desmond Aity's horror, the two years and the detonation and the destroyed man, and she would know that she had felt his impossible night from the inside and had put him away for the rest of his life anyway. If she voted to convict on something lesser, or to hold out for it, she would carry Peter Vasco's incredulous lonely terror, and she would know that she had felt an innocent man die by inches and had then extended his killer a grace that Peter Vasco himself had been shown none of in that concrete room. There was no verdict that let her set both weights down. Every path home ran through one of them.
She thought about the old juries, the ones from before Witness, and she did not envy them their ignorance exactly, but she understood for the first time what the ignorance had been for. It had not been a flaw. It had been mercy, not toward the defendant or the victim but toward the jurors, twelve ordinary people who were being asked to do an impossible thing and had at least been permitted to do it at a distance, to keep their hands clean of the full reality of it, to go home afterward and sleep. The reformers had called that distance a failure of justice. Vera thought now that it might have been the only thing that made justice survivable for the people conscripted to deliver it, and that a system which forced its jurors to feel everything did not produce better verdicts, it only produced wounded jurors, and that the wounds did not make the truth any clearer, they only made it heavier.
On the fourth day she made her decision, and she made it not by resolving the question, because the question could not be resolved, but by choosing which weight she was more willing to be the kind of person who carried.
She voted to convict on the most serious count.
She did it with Peter Vasco's twenty minutes as her reason, the incredulous terror, the lonely certainty that this could not be happening, the fact that he had done nothing and had waited to the end for a mistake to correct itself and it never had. She decided that a man was owed, by the world, an answer for that, even when the hands that had done it belonged to another suffering man, and that if the law meant anything it meant that Peter Vasco's death could not be dissolved into Desmond Aity's grief, no matter how real the grief was, and it was real, she would never again doubt how real it was. She chose to carry Desmond Aity's horror home rather than let go of Peter Vasco's, because between the two unbearable things, the one she could not live with was the grace extended over an innocent man's terror, and the one she could live with, barely, was her own hand in the caging of a man she had felt break.
The verdict was read on a Friday. Vera watched Desmond Aity's face as the foreman spoke, and she felt, one last time, the echo of what she had carried out of that recording, the two years and the detonation and the horror still going, and she made herself keep watching, because she had decided this and she was not going to look away from what deciding it cost.
She went home that evening to an apartment that seemed very quiet. The acute effects of the drug had long since faded, both doses, but the studies had been right and evasive for good reason, because the accounts had not faded with them. She had two men living in her now, the murdered one and the one who had murdered him, each the whole center of his own impossible night, and she understood that she would have them for a long time, perhaps for good, and that this was the sentence the court had passed on her, juror number nine, for the crime of being asked to understand.
She sat in the quiet without turning on the lights. She thought that somewhere Desmond Aity's son was still six and still sick and now had no father, and she thought that somewhere Peter Vasco's people were carrying their own version of the twenty minutes without any drug to give it to them, and she thought that she had done the thing the law required and did not know, and would never know, whether she had done right. She only knew which weight she had chosen, and that she would carry it, because carrying it was the last honest thing left to do, and because she had felt, in her own body, exactly what it weighed.