The American Jury System Holds Firm against ‘Wokeness’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, December 13, 2021

 

Asked to describe the discussions that yielded five “guilty” verdicts in the trial of Jussie Smollett, the sole juror to have broken her silence had a rather banal tale to tell. “The jury of six women and six men,” the Daily Beast reported, “didn’t have any major disagreements but took nine hours to deliberate because they wanted to properly consider all the evidence.” “We went in there with an open mind. I listened to both sides. We wanted to make sure that those who had doubts didn’t feel pressured,” the juror said. And that short delay before the unanimous conclusions were reached? That happened, according to the Beast, because the jury “just wanted more time to look over all the evidence again.”

 

You will have noticed, I hope, what this juror’s account lacks. It does not, at any point, mention Smollett’s race, sexual orientation, or work on network TV. It does not, at any point, inquire as to his pronouns or his politics or his tax bracket. And it does not, at any point, try to set the case within the broad sweep of American history. The headline on the Beast’s piece reads, “Juror Explains What Sealed Jussie Smollett’s Fate for Them,” and the truth, refreshingly enough, seems to be that Smollett’s fate was sealed by the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. The jury “wanted to properly consider all the evidence”; hoped to ensure “that prosecutors had proven their case beyond reasonable doubt”; asked for “more time to look over all the evidence again”; “found testimony from the brothers hired to attack Smollett to be more convincing”; and, eventually, “felt [Smollett’s] answers didn’t have credible reasoning, especially when there was zero evidence to back up his story.”

 

Put another way, the jurors ignored all the noise surrounding the case and did their job.

 

American juries have done sterling work of late. Indeed, in recent high-profile trials, they are an impressive three for three: Kyle Rittenhouse? Not guilty; the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery? Guilty as hell; Jussie Smollett? Don’t make us laugh. This, I’d submit, should give Americans who are alarmed by the march of “wokeness” some hope. Our universities may be full of lunatics, our media may be suicidal, and our corporations may have been captured by semi-literate race essentialists, but the good, old-fashioned American jury system seems to be holding fast.

 

In the wake of the Rittenhouse trial, Colin Kaepernick proposed that the outcome had highlighted “the need to abolish our current system.” As is typical, though, he did not explain precisely what he meant. At the time, I wondered which part of the “current system” he hoped to explode: The presumption of innocence? Trial by jury? Double jeopardy? The right to cross-examine one’s accuser? The very idea of “law” itself? Having followed the rest of the coverage, however, I think I now know. Kaepernick, and those who agree with him, wish to switch to a collective model of justice, in which broader historical considerations are weighed against the discrete facts of a given case. They want, in other words, to 1619 Project the courts.

 

Thus far they are failing spectacularly, and for that we should be grateful. The Anglo-American system of justice relies for its integrity upon the creation of a series of political vacuums. To operate properly, our courts must ignore the political preferences or immutable characteristics of those who come before them and adjudicate only the narrow questions at issue. There can be no such thing as a trial that implicates “America” or “white people” or “capitalism” writ large, because such a trial would inevitably have to ignore the individuals involved, along with their individual stories, defenses, and patterns of fact. At various points in our history — including during Jim Crow — Americans have forgotten this and given into the temptation of collective guilt. But we will not change that by abandoning our system now that, at long last, it is operating more closely to how it should. You will recall, I presume, that the implied antidote to the railroading in To Kill a Mockingbird was not more railroading. It was less.

 

I can comprehend why, having watched the universities, the media, the entertainment industry, and the corporate world descend into madness, many classical liberals have simply assumed that our justice system would be next. But there is a difference between those other institutions and the criminal courts: As a purely practical matter, it is far, far easier for committed activists to capture small bastions of prestige and power than it is for them to capture the American citizenry as a whole. If our juries were pulled only from bodies of which progressives approve, we would indeed be seeing some backsliding in our courtrooms. Happily, though, they are not. They are pulled at random, from the diners and schools and football fields of America, where the Jacobin stupidity of our vanguard is more diffuse, and, in some salutary cases, nowhere at all to be found.