A while back I served on a jury for a crack cocaine case. I don't know why they picked me since I was the only potential juror that answered all of their "do you think _____ drug should be legal" questions with YES, YES, yes, yeeeeesss, yes, that too, ooh too bad they don't make qualudes anymore ... and so on. The furthest anyone had gone up until then was "oh I think marijuana should be legal for medical use." I don't know how it is in other courtrooms, but in downtown LA you speak into a microphone when they are asking you these questions. Everyone heard everyones answers, and I can confirm that people really will say anything to get out of jury duty. I wasn't saying that drug stuff to get out of JD, I was just telling the truth. I think I was finally selected for my answer to the question about being able to discern between what I believe, and what is legal. You know, intelligence. They picked all females in their thirties for that jury.
The whole case was hinging on a bunch of bullcrap and the narco cops, while extremely handsome (confirmed first thing when we were all finally able to deliberate) were really lazy and essentially offered up this testimony: "man in a van with a scale and a bunch of ones nearby a guy who had a small rock in his pocket" - from this we were supposed to convict this dude of dealing a couple rocks. I wasn't about to lock up a human being with such flimsy evidence and I could tell a few other people thought the same thing. The case lasted three days, who knows how much all of that costs the state, but don't even get me started. I would love to elaborate more on the awesome witnesses (an ex-girlfriend, a mom, a friend) and the defense attorney (a middle aged woman who looked like Danny Devito's penguin character from the bad Batman and who ate cheeseburgers and wore same gray suit three days in a row), but I am trying to stay on track as to why I felt the need to write about this in the first place.
In the deliberation room, after we got the discussion about the detectives and their jewelry and nice-fitting suits out of the way and started to give our opinions about the case, the first woman who spoke announced that she was a mom and that, "she didn't want drugs on the street." Not a word about evidence or the case. Just her fear about her kids being exposed to drugs.
Who knows, maybe that was a dig at me and my desire to make herion available at CVS (which is not the street by the way), but I gathered that by her logic, we were supposed to vote guilty because this mom, along with the rest of the geniuses and profiteers behind the war on drugs, had figured out how to get drugs off the street. You just lock people up. Anyone. If only juries had the same conviction about cases involving violence against women... but I digress!
I bring this all up because last night I finally got to see The House I Live In - a documentary about the real effect of the war on drugs on our communities and economy. I didn't expect it to, like, completely blow my mind since I was an advocate against mandatory minimums back in my college days and I currently teach in a prison, and unlike the rest of the naive, sheltered population, I actually am aware of the number of non-violent people that we, as a society, have put in cement cells, but what I liked about this film is that it indubitably, passionately connects the dots for people that don't know and tells them why this actually matters to everyone. Another one to put on my long list of documentaries that will most likely not be seen by the people that need to see them. You should see this one.
We ended up submitting a not guilty plea for that crack case, because it really was a shitty case built on crappy policework and a couple of us pretty much took all the non-critical-thinking gals through the logical steps until they forgot what they were trying to say in the first place, because the truth is people like that don't actually believe in anything and they live their lives sound bite by sound bite. I still think about this so much because I remember thinking how very afraid everyone should be at the average person's willingness to lock someone away.
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