So I did my jury service. More details later, but first I want to consider all the preliminaries that go up to the actual trial, namely jury selection and the question of “fairness.”
I went through the selection process for two different trials (the first trial was settled in a plea bargain just after the jury was selected and seated, which meant I was shepherded to another courtroom for another round of jury selection). In both courtrooms the assistant district attorney asked every member of the jury, several times, if past incidents in our lives would affect our ability to be fair.
We are expected, in a criminal trial, to put aside all past experiences and enter the courtroom as blank slates. A number of times, a fellow jury member was asked if some experience, say, their own divorce from a physically abusive husband, would affect their ability to be fair, here, today, in this trial of a husband accused of assaulting his wife and child. The jurors in the first trial all answered yes, they could be fair, or at least they would like to think they could be fair.
But could they really? Can anyone ever really be fair?
I think fairness is a myth. We all have our biases and they don’t disappear when we enter a courthouse. A fair juror is like the rational consumer economists premise their calculations on: they don’t exist.
At the same time, however, I believe most people will not be unreasonably unfair due to their past experiences. Although, a few potential jurors in the second trial seemed to be counting on this as a way to be excused from service. One of the witnesses was to be a police officer, and so the judge asked if any people in the juror pool had family members who were also police officers. One woman’s brother-in-law was a cop, and so the judge asked her directly if that would influence in her mind the credibility of the cop’s testimony. She thought about it, and said yes: because she trusts what her brother-in-law says, she would automatically trust the cop in the courtroom. The judge visibly scoffed at this. He said, “Do you mean that because you find your brother-in-law credible, you’ll automatically believe this totally different man whom you don’t know?”
The judge was accusing her of faulty logic and he was correct, it is flawed logic. But again, this is how people operate. There’s too much data in the world so we have to take shortcuts when we can. In this case, the juror relied on an association fallacy (my brother-in-law is truthful; my brother-in-law is a cop; therefore, all cops are truthful). To a rational outsider, the logic obviously doesn’t make sense. But that doesn’t make the logic any less real for the woman.
The judge dismissed that juror and a few more too. Several hours later, the judge and lawyers had finally found twelve “fair” jurors and one alternate juror (that would be me), who was presumably “fair” as well.
Tags: courtroom, crime, jury, justice, law
July 19th, 2007
Actually, this post is not about how to get out of jury duty. I’d be the wrong person to write that, since I’m in the jury assembly room right now, waiting to hear if I’ll be called to serve for a trial.
As I wait, I keep thinking back to the last time I was on jury duty. It was late September 2001 in Philadelphia. Security was tight and it took 45 minutes just to get inside the courthouse. I ended up serving on a jury for an armed robbery trial. It was, perhaps, the most maddening experience of my life. The whole trial took eleven days. Our juror deliberations were like 12 Angry Men except in this case, there were men and women, and it took four days instead of ninety minutes. And oh, the one juror who believed the defendant was not guilty actually believed he was guilty, but just didn’t like the Philadelphia police, so she refused to change her mind. As a result, after four days of deliberations, we were a hung jury, 11-1. The whole thing, the whole freaking eleven days was a wash.
I can’t blame the juror too much. The only thing worse than the jury deliberations was the trial itself. The incompetence of the public defender was matched only by the ineptitude of the the young assistant district attorney, who was dressed as sharply as the p.d. was shabbily. Both men were jokes, and I had to sit on my hands during the trial to avoid raising them to ask questions myself.
Law and Order it was not.
Tags: courtroom, jury, justice, law
July 18th, 2007
There’s been a burst of scholarly books about videogames in the past two years, and I’ve been going through as many as I can get my hands on. While there are astonishingly bright spots in individual books, the books overall have repeatedly been disappointing. I’ve begun noticing trends of things I hate about academic books about videogames. Here are just a few of the problems I see:
- The books adopt an overly defensive stance, spending far too much time justifying their object of study, instead of, well, studying it. Countless books about videogames begin by quoting industry-wide sales figures. The books invariably draw some comparison to the film industry (as in videogames soon or have already overtaken the film industry in revenue generated). My problem with this defensive posture is, who cares? Would any self-respecting Joyce scholar begin an academic study by mentioning sales figures of Finnigan’s Wake? It doesn’t matter how big or little a part of our culture videogames are; the fact that they exist alone justifies their study.
- Once the books convince themselves that they’re worth taking seriously, they begin the same way, by talking about games and play. I have read countless rehashes of Huizinga and Callois and not once has a book said something new or somehow added something original to the discussion about play. And very few books seem aware of the latest anthropological models of play.
- The books strive to do too much, theoretically-speaking, and they miss their mark. There seems to be a deep urge to force literary and philosophical theoretical models upon videogames. This is not entirely bad, and I agree that critical theory has much to teach us about gaming. But many books are relentless in their pursuit of theory: Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Butler, Zizek, Badiou–and these might all be in the same book! The more ambitious books don’t just name drop, they also attempt to formulate an all-encompassing, master theoretical model (often composed a la carte from bits and pieces of different–and sometimes opposing–theoretical traditions).
- The cost of all this theory is that the books don’t do what we arguably need most: deep, close readings of individual games. And I don’t just mean “reading” in a literary studies sense, analyzing plot, themes, subtext, etc.; I also mean in a “ludic” sense, that is, attentiveness to the game-like elements of the work (structure, rules, interface, etc.). Many of the books are so hung up on proposing theoretical models that they don’t end up saying anything about videogames. If they do finally get around to examining games themselves, they do it in a breezy manner, saying a few words about GTA III and then moving immediately on to a few sentences about another game. Sustained, coherent, and innovative close readings are hard to come by. (To be fair, this criticism applies to other fields in the humanities, like literary and film studies.)
Of course, I admit that I’m generalizing here. And also (upon rereading what I’ve written) I believe I might sound a bit cranky.
As I’ve said, I have encountered a few eureka moments in these books. But my overall impression leaves me despairing. The field as a whole is spinning its wheels. Maybe I’m expecting too much too quickly? The field is young, after all. Or maybe I just haven’t read the right book yet?
Tags: academia, research, videogames
July 3rd, 2007