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Moroccan Snippets

Traveling in Morocco reminded me of the cliché that Japanese tourists constantly take pictures. That is still true, but the Japanese no longer stand out. Now all tourists are continually photographing with smartphones. But in the old days, the photographers snapped a picture of a person squarely facing the camera in front of some monument or other. Today many people, especially young women, have learned to imitate models when they are to be photographed—a hip jutted to the side, a leg slightly bent and in front of the other, full profiles with the nose aimed up at the trees, and practiced smiles or mysterious faces. Smartphones have not only made nearly everyone into a compulsive photographer; they have also made many into semi-professional posers.

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I learned that Morocco is famed for fossils from the novel The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne. In that book, a British couple hurrying in their rented car (or hired car since it is a British book) to a decadent party in the Moroccan desert hosted by a gay couple hit and kill a roadside collector and seller of fossils and subsequently get involved with the dead young man’s father.

 I am glad to say that we did not have this excitement, but we did see that Morocco is an important source for fossils. I learned on the trip that eons ago the Moroccan desert was under the sea and that many, many fossils became embedded in marble when the waters receded. A guide describing the painstaking work necessary to chip a fossil out of the marble said that those in the fossil trade had a saying: “Europeans have a watch, Berbers have time.”

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The American writer, composer, and translator Paul Bowles, who wrote The Sheltering Sky and Spider House, both set in Morocco, lived in Tangier for more than a half century. Both he and his wife Jane Bowles might be described as having a fluid sexuality. They entertained many artists in Morocco, some of whom were gay, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Aaron Copland. I asked our guide whether in Bowles’s day Morocco was accepting of gays. He said that Tangier was, but not elsewhere. He said that nowhere today were gays accepted in Morocco. Gay sex is outlawed.

On the other hand, we went to the Majorelle Garden in Marrakech. This was created in 1923 by the French painter, Jacques Majorelle and contained his residence. He died in 1962 and the garden and house deteriorated until they were bought by Yves Saint-Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé in the 1980s. After the deaths of these two, their ashes were scattered in the garden. A memorial to them and an Yves Saint-Laurent museum were created in the garden. The garden and house are now owned by the French nonprofit Foundation Pierre Bergé—Yves Saint-Laurent. The garden and its museums are a major tourist attraction. In this case, the Moroccans seem quite accepting of these gay men, or at least quite happy for their largesse to Marrakech.

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Aspects of family law have been modernized in Morocco. The divorce laws, for example, have been reformed. A man can no longer divorce his wife unilaterally. A court proceeding is required to determine such things as child support and custody.

Polygamy is still permitted in Morocco, but the law now requires that a husband get the consent of all wives before he marries another. The guide said that fewer than one percent of marriages are polygamous. My reaction to polygamy has been to wonder why anyone would wish to go through a wife’s menopause multiple times.

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The guide says that women, who can vote, have advanced in society and now hold jobs in the police and military and elsewhere that they could not have had twenty years ago. The majority of women I saw in Morocco had their heads covered, but only a few veiled their faces. The guide said, probably correctly, that more Muslim women in Belgium and the Netherlands cover their faces than in Morocco.

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Moroccan Snippets

Two women were in the row in front of me on the flight from Paris to Casablanca. I could hear the pair taking about routes. They looked like the two fat women on the British cooking show who rode around the countryside on a motorcycle with an extra-large side car.

I was more than a little surprised, then, when I found out that this pair was discussing what roads to take to take as they bicycle in Africa. One was planning to bike for a month; the other for ten weeks, and although she had not planned her precise path, she was heading for Dakar, Senegal, a journey of 2,400 miles. The longer-term one was from Alaska—the other was from Montana—and she was in the Alaskan tourist industry. She did not work in the winter, and she took a long bike tour each year in her non-working months.

They don’t train in advance for their biking. Instead, they start slowly on their trips and work up to fifty or sixty miles a day. I asked if they were concerned about safety. The Alaskan said that she carries a stick and waves her arms like a crazy person if she senses a problem, and so far had had none.

They had shipped their bikes in the belly of the plane. The weren’t going to start biking from the airport, though; instead they had arranged transport to a hotel. I last saw them waiting for a van outside the airport.

I already knew that you can’t judge a book by its cover. I have now learned that you can’t judge a bicyclist by the size of her backside.

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One of the first things I noticed in Morocco were red and green decorations hung over the street that, at first glance, looked like Christmas decorations. Instead, they were in place to honor the national Independence Day, which occurred in 1956. Green is the color of Islam and represents peace or serenity and together with red, which is associated with the royal dynasty, are the national colors of Morocco, much like red, white, and blue represent the U.S.

In this 95+% Muslim country, the displays were not for Christmas (but I did see commercial billboards proclaiming Black Friday), and the many six-pointed stars I saw were not Stars of David representing Judaism or Israel. The old Moroccan flag had a Star of David, or perhaps it was called the Seal of Solomon, and six-pointed stars are carved into many buildings and appear in mosaics and many other places. I saw no effort to obliterate those Stars of David, but apparently after the founding of Israel, Morocco abandoned the Davidic Star. Now the Moroccan flag displays a five-pointed star.

Morocco was a French protectorate from 1912 until 1956, and I learned just enough of this history to leave me confused. Morocco existed before 1912. Morocco was neither incorporated into France during the protectorate nor was it a colony. While it seems that Moroccan sovereignty was largely a myth during the protectorate, the country seems to have still existed. Even so, Moroccan independence is measured from 1956.

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I saw two sets of Roman ruins in Morocco. I had not known that the Romans were in Morocco, but the remains of their structures looked much like the other Roman ruins I have seen around the Mediterranean. The Romans may have held sway for a thousand years over this vast territory, but I sometimes think that they had only one architect for all that time and space, for the ruins always look the same.

One set of ruins was different only because storks were roosting in them. I had never seen storks or their nests before. The goofy dance of the storks brought a smile. They looked like white boys who had not been drinking.

The birds also excited a fellow traveler who is now an American living in Virginia but was born and raised in Germany. Arriving storks in her small town were the harbinger of spring. They nested in the chimneys of the breweries.

To my complete disappointment, I did not see any storks in Morocco carrying a baby.

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The Class of the Bar (concluded)

          My encounter with the two women in a bar who had a lower class led me to think about another young woman I met in a bar. She was tending bar, and her surname, she told me, was Dumas with the “s” pronounced, and I always addressed her by that last name. Without consciously thinking about the topic, if you had asked me after I first met her, “Was she from the lower middle class?”, I would have said definitely not. But I could not have said what it was about her that would have led me to that opinion. I was not surprised, then, to learn eventually that her father was a doctor in South Carolina, where she grew up, her older brother was a partner in a prestigious law firm, and her younger brother was attending a top-tier law school. When I found out that she was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, I said, “Oh, you are one of those fucking smart women.” She paused, smiled, and replied, “Yes, I am one of those fucking smart women.”

          She may have been smart, but she did tell me that she had not read much since leaving Penn. I gave her my autographed copy of The Black Count: Glory, Evolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of the author Alexandre Dumas. I told her that she ought to learn more about her ancestors. (She was as white as the snow that does not fall in Charleston, and I am not sure that she got the racial joke in the gift.) She stopped working in the bar shortly after I gave her the book, and I never found out what she thought of it or whether she even read the biography.

          Dumas was different from other bartenders and servers in the biergarten not only because she was an Ivy League graduate. Almost everyone who works there has some sort of other career that they are pursuing—actor, videographer, music editor, writer, podcast comedian, lead singer in a covers band, Ph.D candidate, psychologist, saving to buy their own bar, tour guide—but she mentioned no aspirations. This also made her different from the athletic director whom I met in the offended-me bar.

          Kris had mentioned that she had a master’s degree, but I did not get in what or from where, but when Maggie mentioned the book I had put down in front of the way-too-expensive Scotch, Kris said that she would like to read more books but that she did not have the time. Most people who claim to want to read and say they don’t have the time are really saying they prefer watching TV or listening to podcasts or searching for online videos or playing videogames in their leisure time rather than reading. They make the perfectly acceptable choice to do something other than crack a book.

          Kris, however, went on to say that in addition to her two jobs as athletic director and soccer coach that she was studying for a Ph.D. I admit that I did not know the field—educational leadership—and I did not know the school–the University of New England. She was pursuing her degree online. When she got home at night, she turned to studying for that Ph.D. I asked if this was hard, and she spit out, “Oh, yes. It is a lot different and easier going to classes with lots of other people than it is sitting by yourself in front of a computer.” But she was determined to get the degree. She was determined to learn more; she was determined to become even better.

          But the deck is stacked against her in ways that it was not for me. In this land of opportunity, increasingly opportunity is available only if you are born into it. In a better country, the strivers like Kris would make it to the head of the class. I hope she does.

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The Class of the Bar (continued)

          The athletic director and the lacrosse coach who I talked to in the I-am-never-going-there-again bar told me that some of the students in their expensive private school acted entitled, but most were good kids and that no parent had unduly tried to influence them. I had asked about this both because of the recent scandals involving fake athletic credentials and college admissions and because I was told that a professional at a squash club had been berated by a parent when the pro had moved a kid to a lower place in the club’s squash hierarchy. The parent, apparently, was worried that the demotion would harm the chances of the beloved and special child going to some selective school.

          But, still, I thought to myself, even if my two new companions did not feel any overt pressures from the school’s parents, many of them most certainly are status conscious. Without consciously registering why—perhaps if I were a good psychologist, sociologist, or novelist, I would have the reasons–the two struck me with an aura of lower middle classdom that they had not completely transcended. It certainly was not their clothing because their dress fitted in well into a Brooklyn neighborhood bar where just about anything goes. I don’t think it was accents or speech patterns because nothing had stood out to me. It was partly from some of their comments. When one stressed that she was from northern Connecticut, she was indicating that she did not want to be associated with what many see as the rich part of the state. Somehow the comment that my old Harris tweed jacket made good wedding apparel said something to me. But it was something more than just a few comments. It was no doubt congeries of factors hitting me subconsciously that led me to the feeling of their social status.

          It made me feel a kinship with them because I, too, come from the lower middle class, or at least on a good day, maybe right after the father’s payday, my childhood family made it all the way up there. I don’t think, however, that I now give the immediate impression that this is my origin. I wondered why and found that I was not sure of an answer.

          I did consciously change some of my mannerisms because of experiences at my expensive college. I found that my ties were not the right width and that it was acceptable to wear a blue Oxford button-down with a frayed collar and that some of my pronunciations seemed funny to others—e.g., the-ate-er. Some of my lessons caused me a bit more discomfort than others. For example, in my first year at college, I spent the night at the home of a very rich girl. Her grandfather had invented something essential for airplanes that had made a lot of money, and the house where I was staying was the grandest I had ever been in. I had hardly ever slept overnight in anyone else’s house before, and not surprisingly I had not slept well in this one. The next morning when I wandered out bleary eyed, the mother pointed down a hall and told me to go to the breakfast nook and have something to eat. Maybe I had heard of a breakfast nook, but I had never before seen, much less eaten in one. No one else was there. I sat down on the bench seating. On the table was a box of cornflakes, one of my least favorite cereals, and a pitcher (certainly not a carton) of milk. I thought that I could get those dry, tasteless flakes palatable if I made them extra, extra sweet. The only other item on the table was a tiny, tiny bowl of a white substance with an even tinier spoon. It seemed odd that the sugar was in such miniscule container, but there it was. I scooped well into the double digits of the sugar onto my Kellogg’s. I was about to start eating when the mother returned and said, “I am so sorry. I forgot to put the sugar out.” Thinking as fast as I could, I put a spoonful of cornflakes into my mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “No problem. I don’t put sugar on my cereal.” It may have been the saltiest food I ever ate.

          But even if I came off as working class in a way that might have held me back when I was nineteen, I think I have shed that cloak. (My parents, however, as an adult reminded me in countless little ways of my less than upper-class origins. For example, I told my parents that I would be visiting them and that I would arrive in time for dinner. Hey, when do you eat dinner? I had forgotten that for them that that was the noon meal. I showed up five hours after they had the table set and the food prepared, which was, how shall I put it, a little dry by that point. Another example: The father was visiting us in Brooklyn. Our parlor floor has ceilings twelve feet high with plaster moldings and plaster rosettes that date to the 1870s. The father almost immediately after his arrival started explaining to me how I could lower to ceilings to a more sensible eight feet, a change that would save me much in heating costs.) On the other hand, those interesting, pleasant women in that no-name-to-me bar still had a lower-middle-class aura. I realize that that made me feel superior to them, and I did not like that feeling. I have been lucky in many ways. I was born into a time where social mobility in this country was real. Today, a child born into the bottom half of society has much less chance of moving out of that status than in almost any other developed country and much less chance than when I was born. (You can look it up.) We still have a Horatio Alger myth, but it is a myth. The rich have insulated themselves and their families by invasion from the “unworthy.”

(concluded December 9)

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The Class of the Bar

          I was in a hole-in-the-wall, neighborhood bar. I had never been there before. I don’t often walk in its direction, but on this day, I was passing it, saw empty seats at the bar, and stopped in. It almost immediately put me in a bad mood. At the biergarten where I often go, I not surprisingly get beer. This place had liquor bottles behind the bartender, and after toying with the notion of wine, I said, “Give me some sort of Scotch.” The barkeep held up a bottle and said “Oban?” I replied, “It doesn’t have to be that good.” He then rattled off the names of three more single malts. Expensive Scotch is all they had. I took the Oban, but I was annoyed. I became more annoyed when I found that it cost $20. I silently vowed that this would be my only visit to the nameless-to-me place.

          I sipped my drink and took out my book. I both wanted to be out of there and to get my money’s worth. As my carefully-measured-to-make-sure-you-will-not-get-too-much-even-though-it-cost-two-sawbucks (does anyone say “sawbuck” anymore?) drink was nearing its end, a woman, gesturing at the stool on my right, asked “Is anyone sitting here?” I replied that it was open, and she and another woman sat down. I only glanced at them. The one nearer me was perhaps late 30s and the other a few years younger.

          I returned to my Scarlett Thomas novel. The two women talked to each other. I did not hear their conversation, but after a few minutes, the one nearer me, Kris, I soon found out, said, “That’s a nice jacket,” and gingerly rolled some of my sleeve’s fabric between her fingers. I thanked her, not knowing what to make of the compliment. The jacket is an old Harris tweed. I bought it fifteen years ago in a secondhand store. She went on to say that a tweed was always good. “You can wear it everywhere. You can wear it to a wedding.”

          We three started chatting. I asked what they did. The older one was the athletic director and soccer coach at a famous private school in Brooklyn, and the other was a PE teacher and lacrosse coach there. I joked, but I am not sure they realized that I was joking, that they must make a lot of money considering how much tuition their school charged. They quickly rejoined that they did not get paid much and not nearly what public school teachers get.

          I found out the older one was from Rhode Island, and she smilingly confirmed that everyone in the state not only knew each other but that almost everybody was her uncle. She told me that she went to Assumption College, and then added, “In Massachusetts.” The other one, Margaret or Maggie, said she was from Connecticut but was quick to add, “Northern Connecticut.” She had gone to Marquette University, and she had enjoyed Milwaukee.

          One of them asked about the tee shirt I had on under the Harris tweed. It had a circle on the chest with “73” on it. I said, “It’s the best number.” Margaret wanted to know why. I said that not only was 73 a prime number, its two digits are prime numbers, reversing the digits yields another prime number, and that 73 was the 21st prime number, and 21 was the product of 7 and 3. I said that I had learned this from Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, who went on to give other noteworthy aspects of the number 73 that I no longer remembered. (I was surprised when I learned that 73 has its own Wikipedia page. Do all numbers?) Margaret said that she did not know what a prime number was; Kris rolled her eyes and said, “A Marquette education.” (I was surprised about the professed ignorance since I thought that prime numbers were a basic part of education and a simple concept. A few days later, however, I was still reading the mystery/romantic/math book PopCo that I had in the bar, and I found the narrator’s grandfather saying, “No one knows very much about how primes behave, that’s the problem. Problems to do with primes have puzzled the greatest mathematicians.” Ok. They aren’t that basic and simple.)

          Margaret said, “You must be smart.” I repeated that my 73 knowledge came from The Big Bang Theory. Kris said, “I figured 73 could not mean your age.” I replied, “It once was my age.” I was flattered that she said, “No way. I thought that you were 60 or something.” But my ego did not stay inflated long, for Kris soon labeled me “cute.” The inflection for this cute was not one announced about a boy band member or a young man or woman spotted in a bar or even for a puppy or baby. No, this inflected “cute” was the kind used in conjunction with describing your great grandpa.

(continued December 6)

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Another Con Man

          Miranda, who helped take care of the child, was upset, close to tears, visibly shaking when I got home. She started apologizing and apologizing. I barely held off the panic mode I felt closing in. Miranda then told me that it had nothing to do with the child. Instead, that afternoon someone rang the bell. When she answered, a young man asked for the ladder. He used my first name and stated that I had said he could borrow my ladder, an extra-tall one because of our high ceilings. Miranda hesitated. I had not told her that someone was going to use the ladder. He continued that he was working at a house under renovation a few doors away. Miranda could see that its door was open. He repeated my name and said that he could get it from its storage space under the stoop where, indeed, it was kept. He said that he would bring it back in a half hour. She relented, and he dug out the ladder. She watched him carry it to the pointed-out house. The ladder was not returned in thirty minutes or even an hour. When an hour-and-a-half had elapsed, she went over to the neighbor’s house. Miranda asked about the man and the ladder. The workers there had no idea what she was talking about. They had plenty of their own ladders.

          Miranda was, of course, upset because she had lost an employer’s property, but also because of the embarrassment we all have when we are duped. I was hardly concerned, however. I was relieved that it had nothing to do with the child, and I had a certain admiration for the con man. I had no idea who he might be. Somehow, however, he had learned my first name, which he could have heard as I greeted a neighbor or workman, but he had also learned where I stored the ladder and that was more unusual and not easily acquired knowledge.

          I replaced the ladder. It may have cost $60 or $80 back then, and I thought about that con man. I actually hoped that he had some use for the ladder–that he was renovating something or that he was doing work for others because I thought that if he had tried to sell it, he maybe got ten bucks for it. Hardly worth the risk, it would seem.

But by that stage of my life, having been a public defender in New York City, I had represented many people charged with worse crimes, and seldom would I have thought that their risks were worth the rewards. I had represented those who had committed street corner robberies, muggers in other words. If they had a knife or a gun, this was an armed robbery with a maximum punishment of twenty-five years in prison with routine sentences for the crime of three, ten, fifteen years. Few people daring the streets where the muggers worked had much money and carried little of it. Seldom did the robbers get as much as $50. To even the faintest hope of making anything like real money, the mugger had to do it repeatedly with each robbery increasing the likelihood of an arrest until invariably arrest and prison resulted.

          I learned that these were not simple economic crimes. The mugger was not so much driven by the money as by the thrill of pulling a knife on a stranger on a darkened street corner with escape not entirely certain. It was about the adrenaline and the domination even more than about the dollars.  

        And for the con man who got my ladder, I am sure that it was more about the successful play and the feeling of superiority than it was about the object obtained.

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A Mexican-American Thanksgiving

          I had forgotten the German-Turkish-American server’s name at my local biergarten, DSK. She feigned being upset. I said, referring to the Mexican-American server/busboy standing next to her, “I have known him longer, and I still forget his name.” She replied, “We call him Doughnut.” I looked at him and asked, “Why is that?” He just smiled, and she explained. “He went to a house of pleasure, and instead of giving out dollar bills, he handed out doughnuts.” The Colombian-American bartender said that it was a strip club near a Costco. The Mexican-American server/busboy had bought the doughnuts at a fancy neighborhood shop, and he had given them out to the strippers. He would not tell me what kind of doughnuts they were—I thought that they should have been Boston cream–but his English is limited, and he might not have understood the question. A few minutes later, however, he looked at me with his perennially sweet smile and said, “Now I am a VIP.”

          He seemed to be working every time I went into the biergarten, and I talked with him more. I think his name was Michael. His girlfriend worked, as he put it, for “a Jewish family” in the Sunset Park region of Brooklyn. Their dream was to save money and move back to Mexico, but I never understood his English or Mexican geography well enough to know where.

On the evening before a Thanksgiving, I asked him if he celebrated the holiday. He nodded, but with slight tone of disgust said, “No turkey.” He clearly did not like that traditional bird and carefully asked me if I liked it, as if he could not imagine anyone enjoying it. He told me that instead his family of aunts and uncles who resided in Brooklyn had a barbecue and would do so on Thanksgiving even though the temperature was going to be in the 20s. Clearly it was a big gathering. He told me that there would be pork and beef and chicken and salmon. I asked if the food was going to be spicy, and he said, “Oh, yes,” but then revealed that there was, as there are at many Thanksgiving dinners, a controversy. He told me that an uncle worked in a Japanese restaurant and had access to teriyaki sauce, which he was bringing for the salmon. Apparently, this was not part of the family tradition and not everyone approved or even liked teriyaki sauce. But Michael concluded, “It is a day for the family to get together and that is good.” I asked if they would discuss our president, or immigration policies, or other politics. He said that they did at other times but not on a family holiday.

I saw him a week after Thanksgiving and asked him how the day was. It was great. I asked him how he liked the salmon. It was terrific. I said, “Oh, you liked it with the teriyaki sauce.” He paused and smiled. “No teriyaki. We had it without teriyaki.”

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Such a Trial (concluded)

          That conclusion that jurors try to reach the right decision does not mean I was not then concerned with who the jurors were. I, like other trial attorneys, was very much concerned. I had notions about who would make a good juror and a bad juror for each case, and I used peremptory challenges in the service of such notions. We operated with little information about the people being called for jury service and without jury consultants telling us who would make an ideal juror. We would learn age, race, and gender as well as any personal connection with law enforcement and crime victims. We would attempt to infer economic status from information about job, education, and residential neighborhood. We might guess ethnicity from a name. We would try to make assessments from clothing, manner of speech, and such “clues” as a carried newspaper. We would consider hesitancies in answers and eye contact. But usually all this information was only for us to categorize prospective jurors into stereotypes. And in the early days of my practice, I lived in a legal world that allowed attorneys to indulge in stereotypes. Race and gender were often the prime pigeonholes. In one trial, for example, eleven jurors had been selected, and both the prosecutor and I had remaining peremptory challenges. Whenever a black person was called for the final seat, the prosecutor challenged. I did the same whenever a white person’s name was selected. This continued until one of us exhausted the allotted peremptories. We may have believed in the power of direct and cross-examination and summations, and the importance of what the judge said, but we also believed in who the jurors were.

          I and others cared about jury selection not merely because we thought that the makeup of a jury might affect their decisions, but also because we knew that what they decided could by profoundly important. I was reminded of this fact every time I saw the face of a person behind bars who had been convicted by a jury a few minutes earlier. And I will always remember the person who leapt onto a tenth-story ledge after a jury had convicted him. He lost his footing and fell to his death.

          By the time I stopped trying cases on a regular basis, I had many views about the jury system. They were not all consistent. The side with the better evidence generally wins jury trials, yet the fact remains that the composition of a jury might be crucial. Jurors are swayed primarily by common sense and logic, but sometimes an emotional appeal is the better tactic. Jurors who are not smart or educated and can’t understand complex issues are able to bring their life experiences to the task. Juries are generally more to be trusted to get it right than are judges, but juries cannot be trusted in every case.

          Since that time, I have gained more knowledge about juries as I did research for a book on the jury system, and this modified my views. Experience and study have led me to several conclusions about the jury system. The first conclusion may seem trite: the jury system is important. It is important not only for the litigants whose disputes juries decide, but also to a larger society influenced by these resolutions. Juries are also important because of the significant role they play in the American system of government.

          The second conclusion is perhaps surprising: the present American jury system works quite well. Juries are much more rational in reaching decisions than many suppose. I have learned that too often people, including me in my early trial years, overestimate how much influence factors such as the composition of the jury and the quality of the attorneys have on the outcomes of trials. The reality is that the evidence presented to the juries is the prime determinant of a verdict, and this is the crucial reason why the system works well.

          The third conclusion is that although the jury system works well, it can be made better. Since juries follow the presented evidence, the most significant way to produce better jury decisions is to improve the information that the jury gets to consider—to improve the evidence presented to the jury.

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Such a Trial (continued)

          I went on to represent clients charged with more serious crimes and to supervise other trial attorneys. These experiences taught me a fact of life absorbed by most criminal defense attorneys: juries convict most of the time. This truth might have led to my disillusionment with the jury system, but I was repeatedly struck by how seriously jurors take their job. People are plucked from their daily routines and commanded to serve as jurors. Most resent it and have to make sacrifices to come to court. They are asked to make decisions about people they do not know and to assess situations and circumstances they hope never to encounter. It is easy to understand why ordinary citizens would not care one bit about what they are asked to do. But they do. Whether I have agreed with their decisions or not, I have observed that jurors almost always agonize over making the right decision.

          This fact has been highlighted by a few exceptions. The one that upset me the most happened in a robbery trial. A woman had been walking in a poor part of Brooklyn filled with rubble-strewn lots and ravaged shells of buildings. Two young men ran up behind her, grabbed her purse, and knocked her to the ground. She saw the two flee into one of the abandoned husks. Her screams brought calls to the police. She testified that she watched the hiding place of her attackers until the police apprehended the defendant there, and then she immediately identified him as one of the criminals.

          Cross-examination demonstrated, I thought, that she had had little opportunity to observe the purse snatchers. They had come from behind, one on each side of her. She had not looked back as they approached, and they had run off in front of her. I tried to show that at best she might have caught a glimpse of the profile of one of them, and although she maintained that she had continuously viewed their hiding place so that they could not have left without her detection, she had no explanation as to why the police had only found one of the supposed robbers, my client, in the building.

          The defendant, a teenager, testified that he had simply been hanging out in a neighborhood building when the police arrested him. He swore that he knew nothing about the robbery. The victim’s purse was not found.

          I then presented what I thought was convincing evidence that the defendant had not been found in the building where the robbers had sought refuge. The victim had firmly identified one location. The police just as firmly said that they had found the defendant elsewhere. Citing official records, I showed that the building where the defendant had been found was located at a considerable distance from the site the victim had pinpointed, with no connection between the two structures.

          I argued that the victim was clearly confused and that it was only natural that when she saw the defendant handcuffed in police custody, she identified him as one of the culprits. However, the identification was wrong or at least there was a reasonable doubt about whether she was correct. The jury, however, convicted in less than an hour. As the jurors left, I tried to talk to some of them to try to understand how I had failed. Only one paused. He told me that I had done a good job representing such a clearly guilty person. He then put his hand on my arm, laughed, and said, “We were especially proud of how you were able to make that building move.” He looked as if he expected me to chuckle at the joke. When I didn’t, he strode away. I was angry, of course, because I had lost, but I was also angry because he had apparently not taken the case or the facts seriously. This was behavior I seldom encountered in a jury.

          Instead I have found the vast majority of jurors to be diligent and earnest. One juror, for example, sought me out in my office the day after returning a guilty verdict. The police had said that while one officer had knocked on an apartment door, another stood out back and had seen the defendant toss drugs out the window. Others besides the defendant, however, had been in the apartment at the time, and the officer who had identified the defendant in the fifth-story window had seen the toss from an oblique angle. The apartment was not the defendant’s, and I argued that they had identified the wrong person. At least some jurors agreed, and they announced they were hung. The judge, however, sent them out for further deliberations. The jurors then asked for clarification as to what “possession” meant. The judge told them that possession as the law defines it is not limited to immediate, physical control. Instead, it includes “constructive possession,” meaning that anyone in a place where drugs are present constructively possesses them. I objected, arguing that the law of constructive possession requires knowledge and apparent control of an object. I constructively possess the books on my office shelf even when I am not physically possessing them, but my visitors do not. However, the judge did not waver, and fifteen minutes later a guilty verdict was returned.

          The next day that convicted juror protested. “I had no choice once the judge redefined possession. I didn’t think your client threw out the drugs, but I had no choice after what the judge said. I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about that boy.”

          Because jurors almost always try to reach the right decision, in cases where I have not agreed with their verdict, I do not ask, “What is wrong with you people?” Instead I ask, “What information did I fail to present?” “What question did I not think to ask?” “What argument did I neglect to make?” In some case, I have realized that the outcome was not the result of my failings or those of the jury. Sometimes the result is ordained by the law as given to the jury.

(Concluded November 25.)