A Trial by Jury Read Online Free Page A

The state (that is, the prosecution) had decided that Monte Milcray was guilty, and this was the state’s stage. The woman scurried out, too careful, I decided, to play along with our collective fib.
    Next we ran through a cycle of biographical questions, which each of us was expected to answer rapidly, in turn: occupation; length of time lived in Manhattan; previous jury experience; friends, family, or close acquaintances in law enforcement or the legal profession; had we ever been the victim of a crime?
    When the occupation question came to me, I said I was a “professor of intellectual history.”
    The judge looked up. “Where do you teach?” he asked.
    Hesitating, I said I was not currently teaching, but had been, until this year, at Columbia.
    He made a mark on the sheet in front of him. I felt nervous, afraid of my voice in the room. What we were doing seemed impossibly grave.
    I glanced at Milcray, whose half-smiling face and lively eyes followed every exchange closely.
    Very few of the people on the panel had no previous experience of crime. In bare phrases people shared fragments of large stories: family friend killed; got mugged twice, apartment robbed; held at gunpoint, robbed; car stolen, house robbed.
    I said, “Two cars stolen, house robbed.”
    In my wallet I still carried the insurance card from a brick-red ’67 Chrysler Newport that had disappeared from a parking place on Osage Avenue in front of my house in West Philadelphia on a Thanksgiving morning many years earlier. I came out into the holiday air with a canister of auto-body cement and an orbital sander to do some work on a ding in the passenger-side door, and stood there stupidly, looking at the spot where I had left the car. Had my convertible dream turned into a blue pickup? For some inexplicable reason, I got down on my knees and looked under the truck.
    The judge explained the standard of proof. The state must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Did we hear that? This did not mean mathematical certainty, but simply beyond the doubt of a reasonable person. “Is there anyone here,” the judge continued, “who would hold the state to an
unreasonable
standard?”
    In my heightened state I felt a strange, somewhat manic delight. Most of my academic life had been spent studying the history of what people found reasonable—from alchemical conjurations to statistical facts. The history of science is, in a way, the history of what proofs have counted as “reasonable” in different communities at different moments. To agree on what is true—about nature, about God—has again and again proved a tall order, and the standard of “the reasonable man” was, I knew, yet another invention (like the laboratory, the footnote, the College of Cardinals) to make the difficult task of truth-seeking a little easier in certain contexts—courts of law in particular. It was a much-contested question, this business of who-all was “reasonable,” and what, precisely, such a person looked like. There was a history here.
    But there I was. No time to pontificate, to remonstrate, to have a seminar. My ponderous classroom musings on Pascal or the Enlightenment were not welcome. I had to act as if I knew what “reasonable” meant, or raise my hand. For a moment the very thing seemed to be made real and hover before me. The ideal of the mind. Reason. Now we would all be reasonable. No more epistemological fretting or historicist relativism—the greatest abstraction in human affairs had just taken shape and entered the room. I kept my hand in my lap. If all the others thought they were going to be reasonable, then, hell, I thought, I can be just as reasonable as anybody else.
    No one moved. Reason had been installed, deftly, quickly, in a second of silence. We moved on.
    The judge introduced the next question with a short explanation of how responsibilities would be divided in the