Demon Time

Imagine twelve strangers locked in a room together. The room is shaped like the long plywood table that runs down the middle of it, dark as a peach pit, and so perfectly fitted it feels as though the walls were raised around it.

It sits on the 17th floor of a 21-story courthouse. Large windows hang catty-cornered on two walls, providing sweeping views of the city below. One wall stands bare except for a dry-erase board, blank. At the far end, two matching bathroom doors face each other like mirrored jean pockets stitched in chrome.

The twelve strangers must reach three separate verdicts. But I didn’t know any of that the Monday morning I drove downtown—it was the day after my birthday. One minute, I was eating Russ’ Italian Cream cake; the next, I was one year and one day older, crawling through Houston rush hour, another set of wheels in the city’s grind.

It was my first jury duty. In D.C., I’d postponed my summons several times, and they’d simply vanished. Not in Houston. The court rescheduled the moment I postponed my date (because of my upcoming travel). Two months later, standing on a Nashville street corner, I glanced at my phone and saw the reminder pop up—for the next day. “Oh shit,” I muttered. “Now what?” Luckily, I could reschedule one last time.

When I finally checked in to the courthouse, about two hundred of us filled a creme-colored bullpen for nearly an hour. Then, the bailiffs split us into four groups by the last digits of our summons’ numbers. My group—thirty-two people—was lined up, handed laminated juror cards, and herded down the hall.

We squeezed into two lifts and emerged on the seventh floor. We stood once more in order before a closed courtroom door. But before we entered, the bailiff turned us around. Something about the case had changed. I learned that because we hadn’t actually made it inside the courtroom, we would now be reassigned to another case and not dismissed.

This time, sixty-four of us lined up—the first thirty-two from my original group, in order, plus thirty-two more. Later, I’d learn: thirty-two meant a misdemeanor. Sixty-four meant a felony.

When we entered the courtroom, it felt oddly like a church—benches, silence, and the sense of judgment hanging in the air.

The prosecutor rose first. He looked impossibly young—baby-faced, clean-cut, sideburns just starting to silver. “What we know,” he said evenly, “is that this was a death caused by a knife.” He gestured toward the defendant. “This gentleman stands accused of causing that death.”

The defendant sat partially turned toward us, hands folded in his lap, expression unreadable. He could’ve been twenty-one or thirty-five. It was hard to tell with his smooth skin, short cornrows, and thick black-rimmed glasses. He looked interested in the process of voir dire, but also unperturbed, almost like he didn’t have skin in the game, or was riding a wave of confidence.

The process of voir dire lasted more than four hours. It’s less “jury selection” than “jury elimination,” as both sides chip away at biases. The prosecutor was smooth, deliberate, but the defense attorney … not so much. Mid-fifties, gold signet ring, custom suit—he looked like he went to Vanderbilt or Washington and Lee—but he fumbled out of the gate like a newly-minted court-appointed attorney. I thought, Buddy, were you handed this case five minutes ago? Cause you’re losing and you haven’t even started yet.

By the end, I was wiped out. I drove home in a daze and fell asleep before dinner. The next day, I wondered how it was going to be possible to make it through a week and a half of proceedings.

The next morning, the trial began. The defendant wore the same black jacket and the same glasses. Trying hard not to look at the guy, I knew in my gut that my dogs probably lived better than this man did. I wondered what his days could be like—or were like—before jail. Did he have a warm place to sleep? Did he ever sleep in the same place twice? Did he know the difference between good pain, such as exercising (on purpose), and bad pain, such as losing a friend or family member unexpectedly? One kind of pain fills you up, and the other one hollows you out like an empty corn husk. I wondered if his parents were the kind who told him they loved him or whether they themselves were broken. I was about to find out about a lot of this and more.

The prosecution presented its case for the first four days of the trial. They started by stating the facts. This man stabbed someone multiple times. This was an irrefutable fact both parties agreed to. What was up for discussion, the proverbial “seed of doubt,” was “the why.” Was this self-defense? Did the victim “have it coming?” The prosecution aimed to prove that this homicide was anything but self-defense. I used the word “homicide” in the previous sentence, versus the word “murder,” because the defense objected every time the prosecution said the word “murder.” Until they proved it was murder, they could only refer to the death as a homicide. (See? Words matter.)

The prosecution rested, and the defense called one person to the stand on behalf of the defendant: his mother. I’ve since thought about this a lot. What must it feel like to an old, frail woman to enter a courtroom to plead on behalf of her adult son? What must it feel like for the man who only has his mother to speak up for him? The defense pulled out his birth certificate and asked the mother what was written under the word “father.”

“Unknown,” she said. It reminded me of the time I winced reading Tuukka’s first vet record. Before he came to live with us, before he became our Tuukka, under “name,” it just read, “Undecided.”

Before the trial started, a friend suggested I be the foreman. I wasn’t opposed. But after enduring the deliberations that followed the proceedings, I’m glad I didn’t offer to do it. Twelve people trying to reach a consensus three times in a row was brutal. I began to think it was rather amazing that the judicial process still existed in the first place, and still worked the same way it always was intended to work. I’m going to get a lot of haters for saying this, but jury duty poses a strong argument in support of AI. Getting twelve people to agree on anything proved fraught with strong emotions, flying in the face of the cognitive fallacies that often follow, especially when we were forced to make several life-changing decisions.

First, we had to decide if he was guilty. Sounds easy, right? Well, it wasn’t. There is always that “one person,” and this was true for jury duty. We weren’t initially in consensus whether the guy who stabbed another man several times was guilty or not. I have to admit, at that moment, I really hated that woman. I seethed with anger. I thought, “You are what gives every liberal Democrat a bad name right here, right now.” She finally came around, but then we had to deliberate whether this was a “crime of passion” or not. This determination would set the parameters of sentencing. If the crime was “sudden passion,” sentencing began at five years of prison time, all the way to life. If it wasn’t a crime of sudden passion, sentencing began at fifteen years to life.

We deliberated for nine hours on this alone. I applauded myself for not saying much as I listened to people’s opinions fly across the table as to why this was or wasn’t a crime of passion. My heart was beating out of my chest, but my lips were pressed together, shut tight. Maybe I am beginning to mature in my fifties. Finally, someone looked at me and said, “You haven’t said much. What do you think?”

I said, “Stabbing someone dozens of times in the back is not a crime of passion.”

Going meta, I began to think this was where we would fail as a species. A microcosm to the macrocosm we live in, when the facts are laid out, scraping off any wrought, irrelevant emotion proved impossible. I was in a room full of smart people—an M.D., a chemical engineer, teachers, an artist, contractors, all successful people by any paradigm. I consider myself a compassionate person, but I also believe the guilty must reckon with the consequences of their actions, no matter their previous experiences. Let us not forget the one who died.

I was shocked how many jurors brushed the facts aside to focus on their “idealized” version of what might have happened. Certainly, this was led by their own sense of compassion and empathy, which is always a fair approach to life’s questions, but I learned a very valuable lesson that day: It’s easy to have sympathy for the person standing right in front of you and forget about the pain and suffering of the victim who is no longer here. It became clear to me that victims need advocates, especially after they’re gone. When it came to sentencing, I suggested thirty years. I thought this was generous, considering.

“Why are you so set on thirty years?” they asked.

I answered, “Biology. How many sixty-five-year-old killers do you know?”

I figured thirty years was enough time for any rehabilitation to occur, whether it be supervised intervention with counseling and medication, or just simply enough time to heal what wounds could be healed in this person—enough so that he could not be a danger to society, if not a productive member with a decent life.

Countering a fellow juror, I continued, “I mean, if your child lived down the street from this person in fifteen years,” I asked, “and he harmed them, wouldn’t you regret it?”

She seethed back, “What sixty-five-year-old Mr. John Doe does is none of my business. I’m here to evaluate and prescribe sentencing for a thirty-five-year-old man, that’s it.” I found this answer wildly confusing, coming from a mother.

But jury duty touched me in a way I could not have predicted. I considered how only in this situation, in this courtroom, would my life intersect with someone like John Doe. After we found him guilty, we learned of his troubled past, which started long before he was sent to juvie for seventeen years. Yet, why did I feel like my life was in closer proximity to his than certainly Jeff Bezos’ or Mackenzie Scott’s, and sometimes this was true of some of the people I shared space with daily, especially when I rode horses professionally. I felt so far away from the people I worked for—owners and clients—and much closer to the immigrants who worked part-time for me. I shared in the scarcity they felt, maybe the insecurity of daily life, as well as their formidable work ethic that no white kids could touch, with the exception of three great kids across a twenty-five-year time period. That’s not a lot.

During the trial, we watched a video of the defendant’s interrogation. He was already being held for another crime that occurred after the murder they had just discovered. Skinny and strung out, sitting in a chair in the corner of a small room, he said, “ I keep asking Jesus, why me?… I am a man, I am not a bitch! … You see, my time ain’t like your time. Your time is 24 hours. But I live 48, 72 hours in a day. It’s Demon Time, Man …Time don’t make no sense to me.”

My stomach lurched watching this wretched soul pontificate his life. I knew he spoke the truth. I believed him. I often say I feel like I’ve lived three years in this one alone, or that I’ve lived several lives in this lifetime already. I understood. I got it. Despite our differences, I had way more in common with John Doe than I wanted to admit.