The Poet's Eye 
          commentary by Lightning Rod

the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgmental

Jury Duty

for release on 08-19-04

On Monday, August 16th, Oprah Winfrey showed her good citizenship by reporting for jury duty. She was confident that her high profile would disqualify her from service but was surprised to be selected to sit on the jury in the murder trial of Dion Coleman, 27, accused of shooting Walter Holley, 23, in a dispute over $50 in February 2002.

Mr. Coleman might correctly wonder if this is a "jury of his peers." What is a jury of your peers?

If you are a crack dealer, should you be tried by a jury of stock brokers and school teachers and computer programmers? Or should you be tried by a jury of other crack dealers?

I have faced three juries in my lifetime and never once did I feel like they were my peers. I was convicted by a jury one time where the members actually believed that narcs were capable of telling the truth. These weren't my peers. They didn't live in the same world as I did.

Maybe Oprah would be better suited for Michael Jackson's jury, or Kobe Bryant's.

If you were on trial for murder, who would you consider a jury of your peers?

I would want Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley and Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and Molly Ivins and Oscar Wilde and William Burroughs and Walter Cronkite and Courtney Love and Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Bill Clinton on mine.

The last time I was tried by a jury of my 'peers' it was in the literarily correct year of 1984. It was the perfect year for Big Brother to stomp on me with his black shiny FBI shoes. After my conviction, the first thing I saw when I reached the Wynne Unit of the Texas Dept. of Corrections was the TV coverage of the John DeLorean trial. It was called the Texas Dept. of Corrections then. As a result of an inmate lawsuit, which objected that there was no such thing as 'corrections' going on in that warehouse for bodies, they changed the name to Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice--another misnomer.

I had just been handed a 35 year sentence in a drug case that was a far more egregious example of entrapment than DeLorean's. He got off and I watched it from behind bars. The only difference in his trial and mine was that he had four million dollars to spend on a defense team and I had a drunken lawyer in College Station Texas who was too embarrassed to stick around for my sentencing. I suspect he was working for the prosecution anyway.

It's amazing what a difference there is between a high profile celebrity criminal trial and the ones that most of us get. When my jury was empaneled, Oprah was nowhere to be seen. The only observers at my trial were my grandfather (who they barred from the courtroom for most of the proceedings because he was a potential witness) and a solitary, dozing local reporter. That is until the last day of the trial, when the DA imported a Junior High school civics class. He squired them in and sat them down facing the jury to underscore his point that the victims of my 'crimes' were these fresh faced young darlings. He marched up and down in front of the jury dramatically and noisily cocking a rifle that was seized in the bust, which I had never laid a finger on, and said something to the effect of, "No telling how many schoolchildren this heinous criminal has Crucified On The Cross of Drugs." It was quite a show. Very William Jennings Bryan. But, like I said, nobody was there to see it. If it had been televised, there would have been commentary on what a railroad job was being delivered by this kangaroo court.

Criminal trials are, in a sense, the pinnacle of our system of government. "Innocent until proven guilty" and "liberty and JUSTICE for all" are the cornerstones of our civil culture. The concept is that every citizen, in a trial, gets a full and a fair hearing of the facts. In the high profile cases this is fairly well the case. When we see a Martha Stewart or a Kobe Bryant or an O.J. Simpson or a John DeLorean on trial, all the processes are scrupulously followed so that the public can be convinced that justice is being done. But in the usual cases, the ones where you and I are on trial, the processes are embarrassingly perfunctory. The gavel comes down in a routine manner. It's paperwork.

This is not to say that prison isn't hard, even for celebrities. When I was locked up in what certain ignoramuses call a country club prison, they had basketball and sports on TV and handball courts and weightlifting. My first question was, "Where is the golf course?" I was locked up not fifteen feet from David Crosby and while I can't say that he didn't get a certain amount of special treatment because of his celebrity, we ate in the same chow hall and bathed in the same shower. But for comparable 'crimes,' he did nine months and I was sentenced to 35 years.

The Poet's Eye sees that we have two justice systems in this country, much as John Edwards describes our economic system. We have one justice system for the rich and famous and quite another for you and I. Try to imagine the difference in the legal proceedings if you got arrested for shoplifting and if Wynonna Ryder gets arrested for shoplifting. She has months of pre-trial hearings and photo-ops followed by probation and community service (more photo-ops) and you get dispatched summarily to the County Jail. Bang. Next case.

Justice

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise.
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.

--Langston Hughes

The Poet's Eye
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