In Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film masterpiece “12 Angry Men,” two jurors nearly come to blows while deliberating over a first-degree murder case on a sweltering summer afternoon in New York City. After they are separated, one of the other jurors, a soft-spoken watchmaker played by George Voskovec, steps forward to break the awkward silence.
“This fighting — that’s not why we are here, to fight. We have a responsibility,” the juror says, in a halting, vaguely Eastern European accent. “This I have always thought is a remarkable thing about democracy. That we are, what is the word … notified! That we are notified by mail to come down to this place to decide on the guilt or innocence of a man we have never heard of before. We have nothing to gain or lose by our verdict. This is one of the reasons we are strong.”
The watchmaker’s immigrant background is cause for suspicion among some of the other jurors (all of whom are white men), but it is fitting that he is the one who reminds the group about the essential role the jury plays in American self-government. Often we struggle most to see what is in front of our own noses.
I’ve been thinking a lot about “12 Angry Men” lately, and the seriousness with which it takes the jurors’ humanity and the importance of their role. It has felt especially powerful over the last week, as Donald Trump surrendered to authorities for the fourth time in five months and was booked in Fulton County, Ga., on charges including racketeering involving his effort to overturn that state’s 2020 vote for president.
As I rewatched the film the other night, I realized that a criminal jury may well be the best answer to the difficulty in holding Mr. Trump accountable for Jan. 6. I haven’t always felt this way. Prosecuting a former president, however justified by the facts, seemed to me like the last-resort option, after the other means had failed.
Impeachment was sunk by Republican intransigence in the Senate. Even though the vote to convict Mr. Trump was bipartisan for the first time, the Constitution’s stringent requirement of a two-thirds majority renders that punishment useless in a closely divided government.
Then there is the 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause, which bars from public office anyone who previously swore an oath to the Constitution and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to our enemies. The clause, originally targeted at Confederate generals, has lately become a hot topic after two respected conservative legal scholars explained, in compelling detail, that it applies to Mr. Trump because his behavior up to and on Jan. 6 has rendered him ineligible to serve as president. State officials in charge of printing ballots should recognize this, they say, and simply keep his name off.
I think it’s clear that the siege of Congress was an insurrection and that Mr. Trump, at the very least, engaged in it. But the scholars’ critics persuasively point out that the provision’s broad, undefined terms are open to abuse, especially if left in the hands of partisan election officials. And any attempt to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot will trigger litigation that will end up at the Supreme Court. It is difficult in the extreme to imagine this lineup of justices ruling that the Republican front-runner for president can’t have the job.
A criminal jury, on the other hand, will not only determine Mr. Trump’s fate; it will do so, as the watchmaker pointed out, as one of the purest distillations of democratic self-government. A dozen randomly selected citizens, notified by mail to come down to the courthouse, will decide on the guilt or innocence of a fellow citizen, who happens to be the former president.
Unlike most jurors, those chosen to serve in the Jan. 6 cases will be very familiar with the defendant. As human beings who lived through the last eight years, they may well have pre-existing feelings about him. But like all jurors, they will be bound by the applicable law, and by strict rules of process and evidence designed to filter out those prejudices. Mr. Trump will enjoy the presumption of innocence as well as all the protections the Constitution guarantees to criminal defendants, including the right to due process, the right not to be a witness against himself and the right to be tried by a jury of his peers.
This may be little comfort to him, but it should be a great comfort to the rest of us.
“This is about political participation,” Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School who has written frequently on the significance of juries, told me. “They’re about connecting jurors to each other and to the government. It’s a political institution designed to have the reality, the appearance and the feeling, the experience, of self-government.”
America’s founders understood this well. Even before the Constitution was adopted, every state provided for trials by jury in criminal cases. In the Bill of Rights, three separate amendments ensure the right to a jury.
Thomas Jefferson called juries “the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” James Wilson, a drafter of the Constitution and justice on the first Supreme Court, saw them as “a great channel of communication, between those who make and administer the laws, and those for whom the laws are made and administered.”
In modern America, jury service tends to be equated with drudgery — a point illustrated by the movie’s portrayal of the drab, cramped jury room, where the windows stick and the fan is hard to turn on. And yet research has repeatedly shown that jurors leave their service with more trust in the justice system than they had when they went in. Even as the number of jury trials has declined dramatically, they remain an essential part of our civic life, and a counterweight to the feelings of cynicism and hopelessness so many Americans experience today.
“Part of the problem is that ordinary people feel no agency. They feel their vote doesn’t matter,” Mr. Amar said. “But now we’re sitting around a table. It doesn’t matter if so and so went to Harvard or who barely finished high school. Some guy’s life is on the line, and you’re one of 12, so you’d better take it seriously, because you are making a difference.”
Juries aren’t perfect; no human endeavor is. But in their effort to find the facts and apply the law they bring us closer to an agreed-upon truth than any other method yet devised, and certainly far closer than the scrum of partisan politics does.
Clearly, a jury may acquit Mr. Trump. That’s the risk we take by trusting one another to render verdicts. It’s what happened in “12 Angry Men,” after Henry Fonda’s character, who began as the sole not-guilty vote, gradually convinced the other 11 jurors to reconsider whether the prosecution had really proved its case. His point wasn’t that he was right and they were wrong, but that there was enough uncertainty, enough reasonable doubt, not to convict. “I don’t really know what the truth is,” he said to the last few holdouts. “I don’t suppose anybody will ever really know. Nine of us now seem to feel that the defendant is innocent, but we’re just gambling on probabilities.”
This is what it means to live in a society governed by the rule of law. In the form of the jury, we briefly create a world in which facts and law, rather than prejudices, have a chance to carry the day. It’s not a world most of us can inhabit all or even most of the time, but without it, democracy couldn’t exist.
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