One juror's verdict on a legal system under fire

Over the past year we have often been told that systemic white racism has corrupted our institutions of law enforcement and criminal justice. Serving on a Ramsey County jury recently, I experienced a different reality that has left me proud to be an American and a lawyer.

The case was a small one involving a charge of second-degree criminal sexual conduct. The defendant was from El Salvador. The alleged victim was also Hispanic to judge from her family name.

The judge was African American. Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney were women. Each was intense and dedicated. Each was a public servant — one paid by the Ramsey County Attorney's Office, the other by the public defender's office.

As the defendant was not fluent in English, the court paid for three different interpreters to ensure that he would understand the proceedings, arguments and rulings of the judge.

Randomly chosen for jury service, I had arrived at the courthouse in downtown St. Paul as ordered and joined a pool of 42 potential jurors.

The would-be jurors were ordinary Americans. Not more than three struck one as being of high social status. Several were unemployed. There were five Hmong and one recent Karen refugee. No African Americans or Hispanics so far as I could tell. Some jurors were quite young; some were retirees. Many had taken a bus to come to court.

Our first experience was voir dire, as each of us was scrutinized for bias or preconceptions that might cause us to ignore the evidence and the law.

In explaining our responsibility, the judge noted that, in his lifetime, Americans had been the denied the right to vote and so could not serve on juries. Jurors grew more serious and attentive. I was moved since I had gone south to Alabama in 1965 to join the march from Selma to Montgomery. We realized that as jurors we had a duty to a higher cause.

The judge asked whether we could truly presume the innocence of the defendant and demand of the prosecutor more powerful evidence than we would hear from the defense attorney.

Given the nature of the charge — sexual abuse of a minor girl — the questionnaires we were given to fill out asked us to disclose any personal experiences with sexual abuse. It also asked about the extent of our experiences with persons of a different race (that one was easy for me to answer: "Every day; my wife is Vietnamese"), any relatives or friends who were lawyers or in law enforcement, details of our employment. We were asked our opinions as to whether children could always be believed and whether memories are trustworthy.

We were given the option of speaking privately with judge and the two attorneys. About 10 did so and most of them were afterward excused from jury duty.

Finally, 18 remaining members of the pool were brought into the courtroom for more questioning.

One young Hmong woman spoke up softly. She volunteered that her cousin had been sexually abused by her stepfather. Under gentle questioning from the judge, she acknowledged in a barely audible voice that she would always believe the woman. She was excused.

Then the young Hmong woman sitting next to her spoke: "I had a similar experience in my family so I will always believe the woman." She too was excused.

A young Hmong man sitting next to me was asked by the prosecutor if he was a follower or a leader. He mumbled, "Maybe a follower." He continued softly, "My sister was abused. I hate abusers. I can't be objective." He was excused.

Then a 30-ish white man in T-shirt and shorts sitting in front of me asked to speak. "I am unemployed," he said. "My wife is also unemployed." Then he revealed that, as a boy, he had often lied to his father and gotten away with the deceptions. He was excused.

Watching the pool of jurors get smaller and smaller, I found myself wondering: Do the rest of us — do I — deserve to serve?

Then the two attorneys excused a few others in the pool for reasons unknown to us and soon the jury was selected. I had made the cut.

There were only four witnesses: the alleged victim, her mother and two police officers who had taken her statements about the alleged abuse. The case turned on her credibility.

She did not present her case well when testifying. But we learned enough to conclude that she had had a traumatic childhood and had been estranged from her mother since her early years.

When considering our verdict, we could have had a field day speculating and imposing our own narratives to develop our own story about what had happened to her — and so about the guilt or innocence of the accused.

But one after another, the jurors rose above the narcissistic temptations. Jurors advanced story lines, only to withdraw them after they heard the views of others.

Twelve of us squeezed around a small table in a small room. The court provided bottles of water and some snacks. On our second day we were treated to pizza.

Our jury was all white, half men and half women, average age on the younger side, mostly working class. There was a chiropractor, a quiet older woman who intensely tracked us all with her eyes, a chef, a male social worker familiar with abused kids, a no-nonsense grandmother.

We elected a young man, a college student, as our foreman to say to the world that no one among us had wielded undue influence over the others.

We sought objectivity to come as close to "truth" as we could, realizing we might be wrong. This process was exactly what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls seeking truth through discourse. We went back and forth on the credibility of the alleged victim, concluding that, in the end, she had told enough truth about what the defendant had done to her to find him guilty on one count.

But we found him not guilty on a second count for which the only evidence was his translated admission to a police officer about a touching at a party. His few words could be interpreted several ways, one of which was innocent of sexual intent.

In short, I saw my ordinary fellow citizens strive to live up to the highest ideal of the rule of law, to deliver the kind of justice that lies at the heart of the American experiment in ordered liberty, what Henry de Bracton called in Latin back at the dawn of the Common Law in England: Non sub homine sed sub deo et lege — "Not under persons but under God and the Law."

We have heard insistently this past year from advocates of wokeness and critical race theory that objectivity and neutrality are impossibilities, just spurious "whiteness."

In the example of my fellow Ramsey County jurors, our judge, prosecutor and defense attorney, I saw otherwise.

Stephen B. Young, of St. Paul, is global executive director of the Caux Round Table, an organization dedicated to promoting ethical capitalism.