Sitting in Judgment: The Trump Trial & Me

Trump’s hush-money trial in New York raises serious concerns about the social contract, as it brings back an incident with the cops and a white woman with a secret.

Day in court. Photo via Anmol Kamath, Wikimedia Commons

Dear Diary…

The recent jury-selection process for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial reminded me of the last time I was summoned for jury duty. Two incidents occurred during that process. One put me on the spot, the other put me on the edge.

Answering my jury summons was inconvenient. I had to take off time from work, get up earlier than usual, take a shuttle from the county parking lot to the courthouse, and sit for hours until it was time to move to the courtroom itself.

But serving was something I wanted to do. This was part of my civic duty. Like voting, paying taxes, stopping at red lights, driving on the right side of the street. Doing these things is part of the social contract. An agreement to surrender some of our freedoms in order to preserve the general good of society as a whole.

As attorneys tried to select a jury for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York, I was faced with a question many are probably asking themselves.

What would I do if I were called to serve on that jury?

Would I fall into the sizable number of potential jurors who were excused on Day One because they believed they could not be impartial? Would my dislike of Donald Trump cloud my ability to be fair? I hope not. When you sit on a jury, your job is to judge the facts, not the man. You’re supposed to rely on reason, not emotion.

Okay then. But what about Juror No. 2, who was dismissed after details about her identity were revealed via social media and during a Jesse Watters broadcast on Fox News? Would I have kept my mouth shut and tried to stick it out in order to fulfill my obligation?

That’s a more difficult question.

I’ve seen what happened to two Georgia poll workers after Rudy Giuliani falsely claimed they had engaged in voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election. I know what happened to Christine Blasey Ford after she testified during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

I remember the far-right extremist who tried to breach an FBI field office in Ohio after the agency’s search for classified documents at Mar-a-lago. I watched out-of-control Trump followers attack the Capitol on January 6th. I listened as some in that number shouted “Hang Mike Pence” as they hoisted a noose.

If it were just me,

maybe I’d take my chances and remain on the jury. But I would not want to put my family and other loved ones at risk from people whose loyalty to Donald Trump is more important than the social contract.

Fortunately, I did not have to fear for my personal safety when I was summoned for jury duty in Georgia. But my integrity was very much on the line that day.

And it was all because of an attractive young woman, who’d played an outsized role in the proceedings. On the one hand, she was a breath of fresh air, flitting among other potential jurors laughing, making friends, telling others about the embarrassing personal item she was forced to remove from her handbag during the security screening.

She was the kind of person whose energy and personality attracts attention. She made the hours-long wait less boring. And in the beginning, I was glad she was there.

But after we were ushered into the courtroom, I felt differently.

She was sitting just ahead of me during voir dire. Close enough for me to notice that her eyebrows were waxed. Close enough to hear her say, “O my God, I think I might have bought drugs from this guy back in high school." 

“But you just told the court you don’t know him,” a woman sitting next to me said.

They were talking about the defendant, an African American on trial for selling marijuana and cocaine.

“I didn’t remember it at the time,” the frivolous young woman said. “But yeah, I used to sell drugs when I was in high school.  My boyfriend and I used to go to that very apartment building to get ours, and I’m thinking, yeah, I’ve probably bought from this guy before.  He does look kind of familiar.”

What bothered me about this was that she was white—and had just admitted to committing the same crime as the defendant. But she didn’t disclose that to the court. Even after she remembered, she took no steps to alert the judge or either attorney.

Disqualified

I was pretty sure I would be released from serving on the jury when the attorneys asked if anyone in my family was involved in law enforcement. Let’s see, there’s a federal prosecutor, a cop, and two lawyers, I told them.

But then they asked if I’d ever had a bad experience with the police. That’s when I told them about the time two white police officers accused me of breaking into cars when I was a college student heading back to my dorm in New York.

“Well, you fit the description,” the cops told me.

I was a young Black male in an exclusive white neighborhood at night. That was the description they were about to arrest me on. I believe they might have, too, if a handful of white schoolmates hadn’t appeared in time to vouch for me.

When the lawyers asked if that incident affected the way I looked at the police, I told the truth. Sometimes the cops get it wrong, I said.

They were finished with me after that. But they kept me in the courtroom along with everyone else until the entire proceeding was concluded. I was glad they did. I watched and waited as the final 12 jurors were selected one by one. I had made up my mind. If the frivolous young white woman was selected, I was going to report her.

Juries make mistakes

The process is not perfect. But I was not going to stand by and do nothing while a frivolous young woman treated it like a joke. She was violating the social contract. And a man’s future was in her hands. If I let her get away with sitting in judgment of him, I’d be violating the social contract too.

I’d feel the same way if a so-called “stealth juror” tried to get on the Trump hush-money jury in order to sway the verdict either way. Fortunately, the frivolous young woman was allowed to leave, taking her embarrassing personal item — and her secret — with her.

What bothers me as Donald Trump’s trial gets underway is that there’s a lot of lying about why Trump faces criminal charges in multiple venues in the first place.

Recently, Fox TV personality Gregg Gutfeld falsely claimed that the judge presiding over the hush-money trial would arrest Trump if he attended his son’s high school graduation, even though the judge has not yet ruled on the question.

Trump’s supporters believe that his indictments are nothing more than “election interference” orchestrated by President Biden. Since the criminal cases against Donald Trump are unfair, it’s alright to be unfair in return by undermining the judicial process. The way Jesse Watters outed Juror No. 2 during his broadcast, giving rise to safety concerns that led to her dismissal.

I understand

why people would believe a campaign message Trump and his surrogates repeat every time he appears in court. What I don’t get is the willingness to destroy the established norms of our democracy in order to protect one man.

If we throw out the shared beliefs that underpin the social contract, all is chaos. And what is chaos but an invitation to dictatorship and autocracy.

Our institutions survived the assault on January 6th. But can they survive the assault on our judicial system as Donald Trump’s hush-money trial becomes fair game for adversaries of the rule of law?

Or will those who care more about making money than protecting the social contract finally succeed in destroying the America we’d all like to believe in?

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Thanks for reading/listening.