Darkness

The name David means beloved, and what I learned over the past few weeks is how twisted this love can be. I was a juror on a trial whose story involves a mother who took her son back in after he hit her in the head, a father who was so afraid of his son that he slept with a gun under his pillow yet still drove his son back to the house instead of the cops because he loves his wife, and a son, David, who believed that all meat is human meat and might have tried to bite his mother only to go on to darker things.

David is also my son’s name, and during the month I was vaulted between the two worlds of fatherhood and jurist. My David dances to Whitney Houston while the defendant David early one morning took out a pocket knife, locked the door and chased his father to the bedroom. His father managed to shut the glass door on David's arm and was able to pry the knife out David’s hand which enraged David so much that he began kneeing the door. The door shattered to the floor, and the father and son were left facing each other. David went to grab his father’s head with one hand landing on the ear and the other near the eye. The one on the ear managed to tear the top enough that it required three deep stitches, and the one on the eye started to put pressure on it. The father, thinking that his son was surely trying to kill him, stabbed his son in the abdomen a couple of times. The son backed off and went outside to be found by a postman. The father wiped the blade and put his gun on top of a shelf. The postman and the father called 911, and multiple units arrived. Some officers had body cameras, and we were able to see one set of footage that showed a frightened dad and an unapologetic son.

The trial seemed hyper real. We had photos of knifes, kitchens, and shattered glass. We had the recording of calls and witnesses being interviewed. We had testimony from doctors, cops, and the postman. It was a narrative that pushed me towards insomnia, and then shock when I realized that I knew the dad from when I worked in his building. What distance I had wanted from the two worlds of one of safety of my family and one of the craziness of the city was gone. I spent the weeks of the trial dropping my oldest off at the top of Nob Hill in a beautiful cathedral and then walking to the court house by descending through the Tenderloin with its vile smells of humans gone unattended. The trip felt less like a route than a metaphor of how our noblest intentions and darkest impulses all share addresses on the same street. It is a small city.

Eventually both sides gave their final arguments, and the bailiff took us back to the jury room for the twelve of us to parse what we had learned. It didn’t go as I expected.

* * *

On the ride to the hospital after the incident, David talked to an officer. He told her much of the above, that he attacked and chased his father with a knife and that he wanted to kill him. The officer took notes on index cards, and when she reached the end of her shift seven hours later wrote a report. It was her second day out of the academy, and she said she remembered it vividly.

Several of my fellow jurists doubted her. They complained that it had been seven full hours. They wish they had an actual recording instead of notes so they could know exactly what David had said. They doubted police in general. One at the start of the trial looked at David with his thick glasses and slouched shoulders and thought David could be guilty of no crime and that it was all self defense since his father had a knife at one point.

The father was also recorded telling his version that mostly matched David's while he was in the hospital. Some jurists doubted him since he gave his account after he had stabbed his own son.

Reasonable doubt wasn’t just being applied to the question of guilt, but also to the evidence. We see so much on the web these days that it has been the guardrails of what we believe is true. The standard of what used to be reporting, when people used to take notes and then write it up later no longer works when you can tweet or post immediately. The past used to be 50 years ago, now it is measured in days if not hours.

The idea of Trial by Jury came from the Age of Reason. Central to philosophy of the time was the belief that educated citizens could weigh information without the need of kings. The people can decide, and while there were certainly moments when this was a bad idea (see the guillotine or Jim Crow) there were times in its better moments that it worked well.

That age is over, and what I learned is that it hasn’t been replaced the Age of Information as much as the Age of Doubt. With so much information now flowing to us, we are forced to become experts at filtering. We need doubt just to get through an inbox.

* * *

The better arguments from jurors came from that David is crazy. He is likely schizophrenic and certainly delusional. He talked about aliens and the grays. He said with no evidence that his Dad was trying to rape him and was holding him against his will. His defense was that the world was even darker still. One jurist commented on how the homeless in San Francisco say all kinds of crazy things and are harmless. I didn’t do a good job of explaining to him that there are different kinds of crazy that I learned from my own family when I was a child and watched my cousin go up and down on his own street of sanity.

David isn’t homeless just as my cousin wasn’t. But my cousin when left unmedicated is a violent schizophrenic. My cousin threw rocks at us as kids, killed birds in our backyard, and stabbed another cousin's dolls on one particular Christmas. He could also be just fine. When I last saw my him he was heavily medicated and in a home. He isn’t David and David isn’t him, but I am left with three beliefs that you can get medical help for schizophrenia, that just because you have schizophrenia doesn’t mean you can’t be violent, and that it is brutal on families.

I did my best to try to bring logic if not process into the room. We had multicolor post-it notes, portable white boards, and voting stickers. We built timelines and matrices. We had the court report read back the transcript of David’s confession. We found faults with the judges instructions and asked questions about self defense. We listened to each other and talked in turn. But I know that these tools and methods used for design discussions can go wrong and have the empty stock options to show for it.

The only guilting charge was for brandishing a weapon. Everyone felt that the knife was real even if the police accidentally threw it out before the trial. Every other charge was either thought to be less extreme or was spilt with only a handful joining me on the guilty side. It is likely that there won’t be a retrial.

The weekend after the trial brought back blackouts to the Bay Area and smoke to our lungs. The north is burning with 5% containment and our electric company is so unsure of their work that they have cut the power to thousands. We are a region that prides ourselves in being enlightened. Where we seemed to be headed is only towards uncertainty and darkness.