Juror #1 Testifies

By ALYSON SENA Palisadian-Post Staff Writer A Brown University graduate, I pride myself on being open to diverse opinions and comfortable in large, unfamiliar group settings. I have a relatively high tolerance for the verbose and can usually wait patiently in long lines. That said, I was entirely unprepared for the jury service experience I had at the Santa Monica Courthouse earlier this year. After reporting for jury duty on February 9, I found myself in a room with approximately 170 prospective jurors. Throughout the day, we were called up in groups and assigned to particular courtrooms. My group of 70 was the last one called. I reported to a courtroom where the judge introduced himself and the two lawyers in the case. Each of us was given a 10-page questionnaire to fill out, with questions about our employment, medical and family history, and personal experiences, opinions and biases. Most of our answers were supposed to be checked off in ‘yes’ or ‘no’ boxes, with limited space for explanation. Of particular importance to me was the section about whether my employers would continue paying my salary while I was absent during jury service. I work two part-time jobs’as a staff writer at the Palisadian-Post and as an assistant to a literary agent’and I knew that neither of my employers would be paying me for jury service, which I noted on the questionnaire. I was not immediately excused, and because jurors are prohibited from addressing the judge unless he addresses them, I felt stuck. I endured four long days of jury selection, which included hours of sitting and waiting, fast-food meals at Santa Monica Place and awkward first conversations with other possible jurors. One small blond woman in yoga pants who smelled like strawberry juice and menthol told me rather defensively, ‘I’m an anarchist and a Buddhist; they don’t want me on a jury!’ Others clutched their books and stood nervously by themselves, as if their fate had already been chosen and they couldn’t figure out what they had done to deserve this. On my fifth day in the courthouse, I was selected from the remaining group of about 30 jurors to sit on the jury of a medical malpractice case. The judge informed us that the case would last approximately 15 days. JURY SELECTION I quickly learned that there are few strings you can pull to get out of a jury altogether, but there are numerous excuses that will get you dismissed. Among the prospective jurors in my group, these reasons ranged from religious or racial ‘issues’ (could this really have had to do with the fact that the plaintiff was a Hawaiian native whose husband was from Israel?) to strong feelings about nurses and doctors. Several people said they would automatically side with the plaintiff and against the hospital (UCLA-Santa Monica) because they had been involved in medical malpractice lawsuits themselves. Others simply said they did not trust nurses and doctors. A handful said they did not believe in providing the plaintiff with financial compensation for the loss of her husband. When I was finally called to be questioned by the plaintiff’s lawyer in the late afternoon of Day Four, I announced my financial concerns, only to be told that I would have to take that up with the judge. The plaintiff’s lawyer, a short, water-guzzling, Jay Leno type then flipped through my questionnaire and proceeded with his questions (I wondered if he was looking at it for the first time): He understood that I was a journalist and that my mother was a registered nurse, though she hadn’t worked in years. Would I be able to look at both sides of the case fairly even though my mother had a background in medicine? Yes. He neglected to ask me about the close friend of mine who had died suddenly just days before his college graduation, which I had made a point of noting in the questionnaire. I thought maybe he missed it or just assumed that my loss would translate into sympathy for his client. Ultimately, he wanted to know one thing: Was my ‘needle’ (as in needle on a scale) depicting degree of bias, straight up (meaning ‘no bias’), or was I leaning more to one side of the case already? I told him my needle was straight up, that I would need to see and hear all the evidence before making a reasoned decision. The lawyer for the defense, a more professional though compulsive woman who preferred not to talk needles, grilled me only briefly. She represented UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital and wanted to know why I had checked ‘yes’ to the question about whether I expect medical care to be perfect. I told her I could not lie down on an operating room table without expecting that everything would be fine. She said that sometimes there are factors outside the nurses’ and doctors’ care that can cause complications. THE JURY By the next morning, I was sworn in as Juror #1. All of a sudden the plastic-encased juror badge attached to my jacket felt like the scarlet letter. Why me? I thought. I looked for answers in the somber faces of my fellow jurors’a tall, blond professional volleyball player in her warm-up jacket; a 20-something Chinese woman who worked as an assistant at a local film company (close in age and from film families, we later learned we had quite a bit in common); an elderly, retired postal service clerk who had to wear special headphones to accommodate his hearing impairment; and a petite and animated woman professor of theater arts at a local college. THE TRIAL The case involved the death of the plaintiff’s husband, 38, who had gone into the hospital with a headache and never came out. The plaintiff argued that the two nurses responsible for monitoring him overnight had not met the standard of care required of nurses at UCLA-Santa Monica Hospital. Why the doctors were not being sued was a hot topic of debate among the jury, but this case was being brought against UCLA, and none of the doctors involved in the care of the deceased were on staff at UCLA. Owing to our inability to discuss the case during the trial or, rather, during our 10-minute vending machine coffee breaks, we resorted to talking about the lawyers. They quickly became cartoon caricatures. The defense lawyer had a sharp and competitive personality that matched her dark, solid-color skirt suits and killer heels. One juror said she imagined the defense getting on the treadmill every day after court, obsessively exercising while reading depositions, which hit the nail on the head. The plaintiff’s lawyer had a comedic streak but often chose inappropriate moments to hit us with jokes. For instance, in the midst of serious testimony, he made a comment about how the judge’s computer screen was purposely positioned to block his face from the judge’s view. His interaction with the jury seemed casual and friendly from the get-go (a strategy?), though he was ruthless when backing a witness into a corner. I had the feeling that he could build a case from a grain of sand, which made me extra cautious in sifting through his arguments. I had never seen lawyers in action before, and I was surprised that the show they put on was as dramatic in real life as it is in the movies. Were they trained to communicate with the jury through their melodramatic eye-rolling and jaw-dropping? The longer I spent listening to repetitive and often boring testimony, the more I began to resent the lawyers’ drama and multiple trips to sidebar, the area to the side of the judge where they could discuss issues with him privately. At one point, when they got carried away arguing about a particular issue, the judge had to stop them by saying, ‘Not in front of the jury,’ at which point they marched defensively up to sidebar. I felt like I was watching messy divorce proceedings. Was there something about the background of the deceased or the hospital care that they weren’t telling us? I wondered how much we hadn’t been told and whether any of it was crucial information that would have influenced my decision about the case. By the time the lawyers delivered their closing statements, everyone’s nerves were shot. One alternate told me he had written a letter to the judge after our 15-day mark had passed, expressing his anger about being kept away from work for so long. ‘Civic duty has taken the place of reality,’ he told me. It certainly felt that way to me as well. DELIBERATIONS When we finally entered the small, windowless deliberation room on Friday, March 12, I naively thought the hard part was over’that now we could actually make sense of the month (four days of jury selection and a three-week trial) we had spent in the courthouse by reaching a verdict. Well, about the only thing we ALL agreed on was the person we wanted to represent us: the mechanical engineer who had previous experience as a presiding juror. His patience and calm attitude reassured me every time we started to get frustrated. Except for trips to the bathroom, which was attached to the deliberation room, we had to call our jury supervisor on the phone and wait for her to come get us every time we wanted to ‘take a break’ or leave the room. By the end of the day, I felt like a prisoner, filing out of my group cell in a single-file line, handing over my parking ticket to be stamped so I could avoid the $8 parking fee (more than half my day’s wages at the courthouse!). After walking through the chronological events and recorded charts up to the death of the plaintiff’s husband, we took an initial, handwritten vote to see where we stood. Hung, six to six: my heart sank. In the next two hours, we tried but could not reach an agreement. The judge dismissed us for the weekend and told us to come back on Monday morning to try again to reach a verdict. We returned at 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning to continue deliberations. The debate intensified as jurors’ emotions about the case emerged. Questions like ‘What if this had been your husband?’ or ‘Wouldn’t you want your loved one monitored more than this?’ seemed irrelevant to me, since we were not supposed to be deciding the case based on our emotions but rather on the testimony of the expert witnesses. Still, I struggled not to let my emotions affect my decision. Not only was it difficult for me to see the plaintiff’a young widow’cry in the courtroom, obviously still grieving from the tragic loss of her husband three years earlier, but it was easy to put myself in her position: Wouldn’t I, too, be seeking an explanation, if not compensation, if my loved one went into the hospital with a headache and died from complications of respiratory arrest and stroke? It seemed to me, as it did to several other jurors, that if the doctors had given the nurses more instruction’such as hourly neurological checks in addition to standard vital sign checks every four hours’then maybe the nurses would have seen a deterioration in the patient. Also, the two doctors who had seen the patient less than two hours before he went into respiratory arrest apparently hadn’t sensed any emergency, which made me wonder how the nurses could have seen more. I wondered why the doctors weren’t on trial. One juror brought up the valid point that we had no way of knowing whether they had been or currently were being tried in another court. Monday afternoon we were still hung and the judge talked to us again in hopes of giving us some encouraging words. When he mentioned that a lot of time and money had gone into this case already and that we should work our hardest to come to an agreement, I felt pressured’I wanted us to reach a verdict but not one that required some of us to change our votes because of the amount of money behind the case. The judge also said that if we couldn’t reach a verdict, the case would have to be tried all over again with a new, ‘competent’ jury. Was he implying that the 12 of us were not competent? If so, the implication didn’t seem fair considering how much time and effort we had put into listening to and discussing the case. Back in the deliberation room, we agreed that we would continue to be open to each other’s ideas and feelings about the case but no one would change his or her vote for the sake of reaching a verdict. The third time we were sent back, on Tuesday, one woman prefaced the explanation of her feelings about the case by saying, ‘In the beginning, I thought all of you were really nice…’ A couple of us laughed without meaning to’rehashing our beliefs about the case, let alone our annoyances with each other, seemed ridiculous at this point. We were all fragile and exhausted. Our final vote was eight to four in favor of the defense, and it seemed to rest on the credibility of the expert witnesses. Though reaching a verdict would have required only a nine-to-three vote, few jurors, including me, were open to changing their vote by Tuesday afternoon. ‘ THE VERDICT Finally, the judge called us into the courtroom one by one to ask us if there was anything else that would change our individual decision or anything that we thought would change anyone else’s decision. I said ‘No’ and ‘No,’ and everyone else must have, too, because on Tuesday, March 16, the judge thanked us, declared a mistrial, presented us with certificates of ‘extraordinary service’ and dismissed us. The slightly awkward elevator ride to get our parking tickets stamped for the last time left me speechless. Would I ever see or hear from my fellow jurors again? After spending three days in the same room together, none of us seemed to have anything left to say. I handed in my jury badge and fled the courthouse building without looking back. THE AFTERMATH Out of sight, out of mind? Not quite. I initially had trouble adjusting back to work and to my normal, daily routine. Two months later, I have attempted to address my emotions about the sad case, emotions I largely ignored during the trial in order to make an unbiased decision based on the facts and testimony of the expert witnesses. I have realized I have a lot of pent-up anger as a result of enduring a month of emotionally stressful testimony and discussions regarding the slightest, most crucial medical details. I’m not convinced that the jury system works as well as it could. The selection process was inefficient and long; if 70 possible jurors were asked to spend one hour filling out a 10-page questionnaire before questioning, why did that questionnaire not help eliminate, or excuse, people from being questioned’like the lawyer who knew one of the witnesses and had previously represented UCLA? Asking jurors to serve for five days seems reasonable, even if they are not getting paid by their employers. For a 15-day case, however, couldn’t more compensation be offered per day than $15? I’m not sure whether my fellow jurors and I were the ‘right’ jury chosen for this case, but we were certainly competent. We may have been hung, but we worked hard to reach that decision. In 1999, California implemented a number of jury system improvements, the most significant being the establishment of the one-day/one-trial system and a limited on-call telephone standby system for jurors. The rules also were amended to exempt a juror from service for a minimum of 12 months after completing jury service. In addition, a process was instituted to decrease juror failure to appear (the fine for ignoring a jury summons is $1,500) and increase juror per diem. Along with these modifications, the court has simultaneously reduced the number of exemptions, excuses and postponements from service they used to accept. One jury service brochure states, ‘The judge may excuse qualified jurors who face undue hardships such as an extreme financial burden, transportation problems, physical or mental disability or impairment, or an obligation to provide care for another person.’ However, the definition of ‘undue’ or ‘extreme’ remains unclear, not to mention the degree to which you must be physically or mentally disabled or impaired. The oldest member of my jury, an 85-year-old man, required a special headset hearing device in order to hear the case. The certificates of ‘extraordinary service’ presented to the jurors on this case were unique, since this was the longest case held in Department J’s courtroom. Usually, cases that run longer than three weeks move to another courtroom.