This reprint is in response to last week’s Sunday Observer article headlined ‘Needed: the Jamaican juror’.

IT seemed harmless enough. I was summoned for a three-week stint of jury duty and, despite the advice of many to get out of this “time waster”, I thought it my duty to serve and fully anticipated it being a worthwhile experience.

At orientation the clerk promised that we potential jurors “wouldn’t regret it, and that we would be paid for it too! Five hundred dollars a day”, she said. We were thrilled. But then she said it would be a long, long, long, long time before we got the money. We weren’t so thrilled after all.

Off to the courtroom we went, to wait to be called onto a jury. You want to listen keenly to everything that’s going on (if you miss a minute you miss a lot), but it’s hard to hear from the back benches sometimes and it gets harder the longer you wait to hear your name. So you find an activity to distract you.

If you’ve been properly briefed on what to expect, you read — and immediately spot the career jurists by the amount of literature and lunch they bring. If you’re a first-timer, you do what comes naturally — re-organise your handbag.

Finally, your name is called and you walk agonisingly to the juror’s box.

You’re annoyed, thinking: “Why’d they call me? What’s wrong with them? Don’t they know that I have better things to do?” But you go ahead, ready to take the oath, to become a “judge of fact” and to use “reasonable inference” and “apply the law” to “render a verdict”. But then the defence attorney challenges your selection — uptowners don’t get chosen for rape cases because we’re too “sympathetic” — and all of a sudden you’re disappointed. A wha’ wrong wid dem? Why dem never choose me? Me nuh look like sensible s’maddy?

After two days of rejected waiting you’ve been empanelled on your first murder case. You look at the defendant in the dock and even though he may look like him cyan mash ants, you, fortified by years of watching the law take its course on cable television, remember that fact is stranger than fiction and that mass murderers are often very benign-looking. And so during the judge’s instruction, your gaze wanders over to that big tree branch leaning up in the court room.

Is that the murder weapon? It must be, you surmise, a very important piece of evidence — after all, why would it be in this magisterial chamber? After opening arguments you discover that the murder weapon used was actually a knife, and that this big tree branch which sat propped up for all your days was never called into question. Nor was it ever used to open the big overhead windows in the cavernous, hot-ass space of the courtroom. Why was it there? It’s a mystery.

But you realise that the tree limb is there only because the judge, a very severe character, allows it to be so. This is his courtroom for sure — he makes no bones about it — and we all behave like good school children as a result.

There is formality, and pageantry, and archaic codes of behaviour. But most of all there is order. And you feel protected by it all. You feel that you’re in a place where no harm can come to you just as long as you obey the rules.

But then the next case is called. And suddenly you feel fear. You watch the procession of young, malevolent-looking men who are charged with murder. They are short, and slim, and so young. One so slight that for a second you think it’s a woman. And you try hard not to stare at these men, with matted and twisted hair, and unshaven faces and hollow, unfeeling eyes. You recognise evil when you see it and give in to your discomfort by averting your attention to the front of the room.

After adjournment you meet with fellow jurors and all agree that the young man in the plaid shirt had to be the devil incarnate. War stories about having served as a juror before and seen an accused man at a stop light, or running into an accused at a post office are traded. You now know why your new friend is wearing a most obvious wig, and you begin to wonder if these defendants mark you and will seek you out for revenge.

You fear victimisation. You are envious of the voluminous black gowns and horsehair wigs that the judge and attorneys wear that disguise their normal appearance. You second-guess executing your civic duty. Should you have tried a little harder to get out of jury duty?

But before your answer comes, all preconceived notions about what evil looks like are dispelled. In the parking lot at the end of the day, the policemen load up the paddy wagon for the return trip to the Remand Centre. You see Mr Plaid Shirt climb into the vehicle easily and swiftly, despite being handcuffed. And then you hear a loud voice coming from the belly of the bus.

He is shouting out, as loud as he can, a message to a woman he knows is standing on the outside. You look down the road and see, moving towards the front of the barricade, in a sea of mothers and daughters, girlfriends, sisters and wives, this woman that the prisoner is calling out to. She shouts back, urgently telling him that she doesn’t understand the message. He shouts the message again. She wails desperately that she doesn’t understand. He shouts unintelligible words over and over.

The truck pulls away, and the women who had gathered begin to disperse. You are struck by the stillness and the quiet, and you realise that everyone on that street, for just a few minutes, engaged in a tacit conspiracy to keep quiet and allow these two people, this accused man and this loyal woman, a final communication.

And you are reminded that we are all human beings, capable of a variety of feelings and emotions and actions. And that there, but for the grace of God, and the love and guidance of friends and family and the will to live an honest and good life, go I.

If called for jury duty, dear readers, please serve.

scowicomm@gmail.com