12 Lovely Citizens

I just spent the last 10 day on jury duty. Of course I read 12 ANGRY MEN, but I did not relate. My fellow non-angry jurors were the best.

A place to explore: The jury box! Good luck summoning a summons.

I had been wanting jury duty for YEARS. Every semester, I teach my students about jury duty and bemoan the fact that I’ve never served on one. I’ve been desperate to see the process that I teach about play out in person.

Earlier this month, I finally got my chance.

Throughout the selection process, the trial, the documents, the witness questioning, and the deliberations, my mind kept clicking back to school. If jury duty is “real life,” then school is indeed preparing students for “real life.”

Here are all the ways a courtroom is like a classroom:

• Bathroom breaks: You know how non-teachers will rail against public schools on social media by saying that teenagers asking permission to use the bathroom is demeaning? Well guess what, you can’t just go to the bathroom when court is in session either. You have to ask the judge first, and it damn well better be an emergency.

• Binders. So many binders. So much paper. So many copies.

• You’ll get called on, even if your hand isn’t raised. During jury selection, there were about 50 folks in the court room and the lawyers had to whittle it down to 14.¹ Lawyers took turns talking to the jury to suss out who would be sympathetic (or not) to their side. If a lawyer got a potential juror to admit bias, they’d ask the judge to dismiss that juror. Then, each lawyer got to dismiss 5² without cause. Naturally, the lawyers both tried to get rid of people they didn’t want during the discussion time so they didn’t have to use up their 5 dismissals. Because this was a case that involved someone who claimed she’d injured her shoulder in a car accident, lawyers asked who’d had shoulder injuries. Those who had raised their hands and then had a back-and-forth conversation with the lawyer. Much like in the classroom, people would have to speak up, in a loud and clear voice, in front of the rest of the room. But if you never raised your hand, the lawyers still wanted to hear from you. Jurors would get cold-called to answer more general questions, just like when teachers write their student’s names on popsicle sticks and draw them during class discussions. Jurors would also be asked their opinions on what others had just said. In the classroom and the courtroom, speaking and listening skills are required.

• Armed security guards

• Jury deliberation = Socratic Seminars The 12 of us deliberated for over 6 hours. It was one of the most nuanced and careful discussions of my life. I’ve never been with 11 other people who were so good and listening, thinking, and discussing. Seriously. We all gave our opinions, backed them up with all the evidence spread across the table, connected the facts to our own life experiences, and listened carefully to each other. A lot of us (myself included) changed our minds after listening to our fellow jurors. All my fellow jurors would have gotten an A+ on my Socratic Seminar rubric.

• Phones calls for absences and tardies. Just like schools will robo-call families, the judge will also have her people call you if you are late (like, one minute late) to jury duty.

Here are all the ways a courtroom is NOT like a classroom:

• No cell phones. Ever. Of course we didn’t have them in court, but during deliberation, the judge gave us strict no-phone rules. She mentioned that some judges collect all the phones before deliberation. She didn’t do that, opting to trust us. And indeed, all 12 of us kept those phones away for the whole 6+ hours of deliberation.

• Metal detectors

• Everyone pays attention all the time, behaves themselves, takes notes, refrains from side conversations, and is respectful. Teaching would be really weird if students acted as perfect as we jurors were.

A book to read: 12 ANGRY MEN by Reginald Rose

This play was super fun to read during one of my hour-and-a-half lunch breaks (oh! that’s another difference! More than 26 minutes to eat lunch). Here’s how some of the lines from the play (set in 1957) lined up with my own 2024 experience:

Photo by me, Jenna Vandenberg, Juror #11

7TH JUROR: This better be fast. I got tickets to a ball game tonight. Yankees-Cleveland. We got this new kid pitching…” (pg 9)

Thank goodness I wasn’t called for jury duty during baseball season. I would have been really hard to stay off my MLB app, especially if there was a new kid pitching. I love watching a pitcher debut.

10TH JUROR: Brother, you can say that again. The kids who crawl outa those places are real trash. I don’t want any part of them, I’m telling you.

5TH JUROR: [rising] I’ve lived in a slum all my life. I nurse that trash in Harlem Hospital six nights a week…I used to play in a backyard that was filled with garbage…

FOREMAN [to the 5TH JUROR]: Now, let’s be reasonable. There’s nothing personal…

5TH JUROR: There is something personal! (pg 18)

I loved this bit in the book - it’s such a great plotline that highlights the importance of having a diverse jury - and thought about it as we jurors deliberated our case. The lawyers had weeded out anyone with medical or insurance experience, but still. We all brought all our past experiences, knowledge, biases, and judgements to the case. One of the jurors sympathized with the medical plight of the plaintiff because she too had gotten a run around with millions of doctors regarding her long-term injury. Another of the jurors refused to disregard an ultrasound as a false negative because he’d had a career of designing ultrasound machines. Some jurors thought the plaintiff’s story reeked of fake “poor me” vibes, others believed her. Our juror backgrounds really, really mattered.

4TH JUROR: Quiet! Let’s be quiet. [To the 8TH JUROR.] Where d’you get that knife.

8TH JUROR: I was walking for a couple of hours last night, just thinking. I walked through the boy’s neighborhood. The knife comes from a little pawnshop three blocks from his house. It cost six dollars. (pg 23)

You can’t do that, angry man juror #8! We were given VERY SPECIFIC instructions to not look up or research any aspects of the case or visit the area where events happened.

This was actually a bit tricky. I was desperate to look up some of the health conditions mentioned in the case and the social media accounts of the plaintiff (some of her social media posts were entered into evidence, but obviously not everything), which obviously I did not do until after the trial.

Also, there is no way you can waltz through a courthouse with a switchblade these days. Yay for security checkpoints.

6TH JUROR: It beats workin’ (pg 30)

I know I write about how I love teaching and all that, but teaching is so hard and so exhausting. Jury duty is a million times easier than teaching.

Even factoring in the weeks-long sub planning and those few 6am mornings I spent at the school copy machine to get work ready for my students before heading to court, my 2+ weeks of jury duty was pretty much a vacation.

Jury duty was two weeks of sleeping in, taking long lunches, not having to manage behavior, and getting to sit down and learn from someone else. Pure bliss. I returned to school completely rejuvenated and excited to teach.

7TH JUROR: My friend, for your three dollars a day you’ve gotta listen to everything. (pg 44)

We got $10 a day.

10TH JUROR: These people are multiplying. That kid on trial, his type, they’re multiplying five times as fast as we are. That’s the statistic. Five times. And they are - wild animals. They’re against us, they hate us, they want to destroy us. That’s right…For God’s sake, we’re living in a dangerous time, and if we don’t watch it, if we don’t smack them down whenever we can, then they are gonna own us. They’re gonna breed us out of existence… (pg 65)

Was angry man juror #10 Donald Trump? Sounds like it.

None of my fellow jurors were mean or racist. At all. They were all wonderful people, all trying their best to understand the case and come up with a fair outcome. My fellow jury members actually gave me hope for humanity and citizenship - something I desperately needed to be restored, this being two weeks after the Nov 2024 election.

Obviously the jury wasn’t random. Although we were a diverse bunch in terms of age/gender/race, the jury process weeds out poor folks (several people were dismissed for financial hardship), non-civically minded people (who are not likely to respond to a jury summons) and socially awkward people (who the lawyers zone in on and dismissed during jury selection).

At the beginning of 12 ANGRY MEN, 11 jurors were ready to call the defendant guilty and one man wasn’t sure. The play ends when the jury decides on a not-guilty verdict.

In the case I juried for, the plaintiff was involved in a minor car accident in which her shoulder was injured. Several months later, the shoulder had a rotator cuff tear and needed surgery. She wanted $650,000 from her insurance company for pain and suffering.

Our jury would not agree that the rotator cuff tear was related to the accident and awarded $45,000 for pain and suffering.

A lesson to teach: All about jury duty

When my jury summons came in the mail, my first thought was: “Yes! now I have a clean sample of a jury summons for my students!”

I always teach my American Government students about jury duty, but the sample summons I have is a copy of a copy of a copy. Here is a PDF link to my summons for anyone who teaches Civics or Gov. Here are student questions that guide students through reading the small print. Also included on the worksheet are questions for a VOX video on jury selection.

The main shebang of my teaching unit on the judicial branch is another case study from Harvard. Students learn about a trial in post-Reconstruction Virginia, wherein two Black boys are accused of murder and for *some reason* there were no Black folks called in for jury service. A federal lawyer gets involved. He removes the accused boys from local custody³ and indicts their judge (and a few other judges) for discrimination. Obviously this doesn’t go over well in Virginia and the case goes to the Supreme Court. It’s one of the first tests of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is one of the Reconstruction Amendments that addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the law.

America fails the test.

The Supreme Court sides with the racist judges, which pretty much gives the South an open road to segregationist Jim Crow laws for the next 80+ years.

So that sucks.

But it’s a fascinating case to read and my students get pretty into it. The case and the materials are not mine to share, but do check out Harvard’s Case Method Project. They do fabulous free trainings for teachers which will unlock this case study and dozens like it.

If you purchase 12 ANGRY MEN using the links in this post, I get a small portion of the sale, so thank you! The link connects you to Bookshop, which directs your purchase to your local and independent bookstore.

1. 12 plus 2 alternates. The alternates didn’t know who they’d be until the end of arguments.

2. I think

3. Apparently, to take them to federal court and give them a fair trial, although this never happens.