JURY

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

Wednesday, I sat on the third floor of the Multnomah County Central Courthouse with a full house of potential jurors. The jury room is light-filled — a wall of windows faces east and looks over the Hawthorne Bridge and the busy waterfront below. The newly built courthouse opened in 2020 and not long after that it was scaffolded in plywood after the city was embroiled in the heat and heartbreak of the Black Lives Matters protests. The wooden fortress remained firmly in place until July 2023. As I walked up to the building this week, I could see into the atrium, and the line of people waiting to process through metal detectors. Once upstairs, I was struck by stunning views of the city — and the fact that no one seemed to notice. Instead, the room circulated with the nervous energy of a long-delayed flight at the gate. Impatience and distraction.

A judge opened the morning thanking us for our time. She recognized that we commitments and caregiving and jobs outside of the courthouse. She continued with a history lesson that stressed that gender and racial bias excluded people from being allowed to serve. In fact, not until 1975 did the Supreme Court determine that excluding women from jury service violated the requirement that a jury be drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. Our judge provided a perspective on a citizen’s responsibility to listen, consider, and provide unbiased opinions based on the facts of case. It is a civic role we perform as a member of the community.

When I informed our writers that the workshop was cancelled for my jury duty, one man quipped that he wished I had served on his case. In that glass building, I wondered how one really puts aside implicit bias. We all like to think that we can be fair, a good judge. It’s simply a matter of weighing a set of facts. Our judgements are based on our life experience — or lack of experience. As we have worked with folks inside, we have met people who were wrapped into the system as youngsters which made a life sentence in the state penitentiary seem like a foregone conclusion. We have met people who say they were so deep into their addiction that going to prison saved their lives. Systemic racism and poverty play a heavy penalty on outcomes for a disproportionate percentage of those folks incarcerated. The courthouse, like prison, contains the most complex stories of our community.

Sitting in the jury room, I thought about a workshop exercise we did at OSP. The writers were given a copy of Mary Oliver’s poem October, each copy of the poem was given a different title. After reading and thinking about his uniquely titled poem, each writer argued for an interpretation based on the assigned title. The fact is that only one title was correct. And yet, it also became clear how each person could make a reasonable argument for his title, for his interpretation. Stressla Lynn Johnson’s abstract essay, What’s in a Name? unwinds his impressions of the conversation that ensued. While our collective considered multiple levels in the poem — no one chose the correct title.

I worked most of the day in a corner far from the distraction of Mount Hood … and the river … and the signs of a life outside. Time moved slowly, punctuated by calls for people to go upstairs to a courtroom. In the afternoon, I was drawn to the sunlight. I longed to be walking along the river on a rare sunny day in January. I was not in charge of my time, nor could we control if I would be assigned to a trial. From Stressla’s essay, The Natural World is Everywhere: “Even in this steel-concrete cell, behind a 30-foot concrete wall, designed to isolate and foster a sense of hopelessness. The natural world cannot, will not be withheld, or destroyed in the heart and mind of the captive souls.” The court released us at the end of the day, and I walked out into the fresh air. | TDS