The Trial

For 1 month last summer I followed the same strange daily ritual. I emerged from the subway at 12:40 pm called in an order for a small pho beef noodle soup. It takes 5 minutes to walk from the train station to the Vietnamese restaurant located on the fringe of Chinatown... which is the exact amount of time it takes to prepare the pho and have it ready on the table. I would eat quickly enough to make it to the metal detector line at the courthouse across the street. By 1 o'clock, I was in my assigned seat in the courtroom as a juror. 

During the first week, 20 of us sat and listened to cases and determined whether they should proceed to trial. This is the process that has been adopted as a reaction to British rule. Before the Revolution, American political dissenters were prosecuted by British judges without jury, often unfairly. To ensure fair trials in their new country, Americans adopted a system where everyday citizens are called upon to witness and participate in judicial proceedings. Drug possession, shoplifting, check fraud, weapons possession... each time a case was brought in, a prosecutor would read the technical definition of the crime from a thick book and methodically present the evidence arguing for trial. I don’t think the founding fathers ever imagined 20 professionals sacrificing 1/2 a day of work  for 4 weeks to oversee prosecutions of such petty crimes. I was very disgruntled for having to make up lost work time with nightly unpaid overtime during my jury duty. 

Most of the cases were straightforward with cops or undercover detectives providing evidence and testimony. No defendants took the stand, probably because they knew their chances of averting trial was slim. The prosecutors were young. Their suits looked a bit oversized, as if waiting for the budding lawyers to grow into them. They were working their way up by prosecuting petty crimes. Only 11 jurors aye votes are needed to have cases proceed to trial. Surprisingly, the African Americans on grand jury never voted to have cases presented  proceed to trial. For them, they viewed the police with suspicion, often mistrusting their testimony. The potential sentences for these crimes most often committed by African Americans was often very harsh. Life-altering-incarceration-time harsh. 

The start of the second week was different. This time, a witness dressed in prison garb came to the stand.  A light gray shirt and pants like medical scrubs and prison shoes. I thought it was mysterious a prisoner was providing testimony. Can someone convicted of a crime be trusted himself to convict another? He walked to the table, was sworn in... then proceeded to start a strange tale...

"My mom and I were hosting a party in our apartment. My mom’s boyfriend G. was there. Everybody was having a good time until one of my childhood friends, J. threw up. We told him that shit wasn't funny and he had to clean it up... but he was too drunk, and refused. Unhappy with his behavior, we kicked J. out the door. But you know, J. kept knocking on the door drunk trying to get back in. The next time J. knocked, G. went angrily out the apartment with a toilet paper roll and a bottle of liquor and told everyone he would "take care of the situation".  G. came back, and the party continued for a while until we heard a frantic knock on the door. I opened the door and saw J. half burned and smoldering... like his flesh looked like meat. J kept asking me "what happened... why did they do this to me?" The witness choked up recounting the scene. "Calls were made to the fire department. G. warned everyone at the party if they told the police anything, he would come after them. When the police investigated what had happened, no one from the party provided testimony. The case went unsolved for 5 years. It was assumed somehow J. got drunk, and somehow lit himself on fire." 

After the testimony, jurors have to wait for the next witness to arrive. There was never a set schedule. sometimes you would  wait half an hour, other times a couple hours. You never knew when the next witness would take the stand, or who the next witness would be. During this intermission, we jurors looked at each other in a daze silently trying to process the information we had just heard. Chances are, in our everyday lives, we would never have interacted with any of the witnesses we were about to see or the victim. Now we were not only being led into their world but into their most tightly held  secrets. 

I’ve never been inside a housing project myself. They sit in the city like ominous large brick buildings, looming over trash filled green space with empty park benches. It was thought in the 1960s by clearing our slums and moving poor black and Hispanic people to high rise buildings with plentiful light and air (tower in the park), all the urban troubles they faced in low rise congested  slums  would be solved. The social problems actually became magnified in the housing projects. Without stores at their base for retail, or  architecture designed at a human scale to encourage community, these places have become dangerous black holes of poverty, cut away from the city fabric, isolated islands of desperation. 

The warden knocked on the door and abruptly announced the next witness to take the stand. She was a doctor, a middle aged woman coroner.

After her credentials and expertise were presented, she talked about her role. Every suspicious death in nyc is examined by a coroner to determine cause of death. The doctor recounted what happened in J.’s case. He came to his hospital badly burned and unconscious. J. was immediately set in a special isolation chamber. Skin grafts were performed. Periodically J.’s  skin would need to be cut to let breathe. Healthy skin is porous. Badly burned skin is hard, and must be cut open to heal. After a couple weeks, J. succumbed to an infection and passed away. The testimony by the doctor was the most unsettling as slides of the victim were projected on a screen and discussed in exhaustive medical detail. At this point in the trial, i realized there would be no justice for the victim. He had died and there was no way to bring him back. The most we could do was to bring the perpetrator to justice. 

As this was the first time on jury, I was struck that the whole process was a story telling process. Different people were taking the stand and testifying about what they saw happen. It was up to the jury to piece the stories together to figure out what happened. The sequence of the witnesses was suspenseful... each providing color to the trial. 

I couldn’t sleep after the testimony that night. I kept imagining what happened, and replaying the events in my mind. It did seem very strange the events in question occurred 5 years ago.

The third witness to take the stand was an old fire marshall. He explained that fire marshals are elected by their department after a career of commendable service. Fire Marshall’s duties include investigating causes of arson. The fire marshall explained the physical evidence at the site. Burn marks found within the stairwell indicated an accelerant was used to start a fire. An accelerant like alcohol, when lit, could cause a strong enough fire to create a burn mark in concrete. Photos of the stairwell with char marks were shown. 

After the fire marshall left, the last witness rolled into the court...

She was a middle aged black woman in a wheel chair with cornrows who had one leg amputated. She identified herself as the girlfriend of G. The last time she saw G. was on a street corner.. He asked her for twenty dollars. She told him she didn’t have it. She had just gotten her leg amputated for diabetes complications and was short on cash and limited to a wheelchair. When she didn’t give it, he punched her hard in the back of the head. At that point, she decided to bring the story of G. to the police. Her testimony was the last climactic piece of the puzzle and provided the motive for conviction. “I was sleeping when G. came back to our apartment without a shirt covered with ash. I asked him what happened?  He said, ‘you’ll never believe what happened! I was out at a party last night. I saw J. at the party. He owed me some cash. When I saw him leave the apartment, I went to ask for my money back.  I saw him passed out in the stairwell. To try to wake him up, I lit a small fire on him.  I didn’t realize his jacket was flammable, and all of sudden he started burning fast. I made my way back to the apartment and started heading out. As I was exiting the lobby, J. had just come down in the elevator just as the  fire fighters and police arrived. To remove any suspicion that  I caused the fire, I took off my shirt and said “shit that nigger’s on fire!” And proceeded to blanket Jay to put out the remaining  flames. If you tell anyone about this, I’ll throw you into the river in a barrel.’ A few weeks later after J. passed away, G. told me it was cause J. had AIDS that he got the infection and died. I didn’t do it.”

the woman was wheeled out of the courtroom. through her story, the puzzle pieces provided by the convict, coroner, fire marshall, ex-con, and girlfriend coalesced to reveal the disturbing portrait and motives of G., the only person outside of the deceased who knows what really happened the night of the murder.