This morning, I had more fun than I’ve had on a Sunday morning in a very, very long time. My typical Sunday morning involves waking up with my alarm at 7:00, at which point I slam my hand down on the snooze alarm repeatedly until about 11:00 am. As satisfying as it is to sleep in when I don’t have anywhere else to be, it isn’t as if the day couldn’t start out better.
Today, it was better.
The law school I attend has a program where they compress an entire course in trial advocacy into a single (very) intensive week. A friend of mine participated in this program this past week and held his trial this morning at 8:30 am in the Shawnee County Courthouse. I was a jury member.
It probably says a lot about my psyche that I love jury service. I’ve been called for jury duty three times before, but have never actually gotten to sit on a jury (they usually fill the juries well before they get to me). It truly irks me that after I complete law school, I will likely never again be able to have a chance to be on an actual jury since attorneys tend to exclude from juries anyone who has the slightest idea what they are doing. I can understand why, of course. It is much easier to be an attorney when you don’t have to worry about whether juror number four is wondering why you didn’t object to some testimony or why some obscure motion wasn’t made.
I love jury service because I like the idea of being put in a position where I can exercise my wisdom. I tend to think that I have a great deal of wisdom. I may not be overly intelligent. I may not have a lot of common sense. But I am wise in the ancient Greek meaning of the term – in other words, I can recognize the good life and how to move from where we are to get to it. It is actually hard for me to explain how I think this way, since (at least as I understand it) the way that other people interact with the world is so terribly foreign to me.
But I’m digressing again from what I told myself would be an interesting group of pointers on how to ensure, if you are ever on a jury, that you can get your way. While I like being able to exercise the ability to judge important matters, I detest the fact that there have to be other people on juries. Maybe that’s egotism, but I’ve been a judge for several kinds of contests before (high school debates, formal debates, high school forensics tournaments, mock trial competitions, etc.) and in every case, it almost always seems that when the decision rests on a panel of people of which I am a part, their decisions are frequently laughably backwards.
Being on the jury this time was no different. Two of the jurors (there were only five of us, so it wasn’t a normal-sized jury) wanted to decide the case in favor of the students who had spoken most eloquently. Note that they didn’t want to decide the case in favor of the team that had presented the best evidence, and who also spoke eloquently. Rather, the asserted basis for their initial decision was (and I quote here) that “he [the student who had delivered the prosecution closing] just spoke with such conviction.”
Yikes.
The good thing is that there are ways for you (my smart readers) to use psychology, positioning, and certain tactics to ensure that cases are decided in the manner in which you wish them to be decided.
Want to know that magic key that allows you to decide the case for yourself as if the other jurors weren’t there to bring up wholly irrelevant speculations and make frighteningly fallacious inferences? Here it is, and read it twice to make sure you learn it well:
Be the jury foreperson.
That’s the magic wand with which you can see the case decided correctly. Be the jury foreperson. People defer to those that they view as authority figures, whether rightly or wrongly, and are willing to go to fantastical lengths to avoid responsibility (a fact written about after WWII by a German psychologist by the name of Erich Fromm in his “Escape from Freedom”).
The Milgram experiments are a perfect example. Stanley Milgram (one of my personal heroes from the field of psychology) wanted to test ideas like those of Erich Fromm. He wondered whether people really would abdicate their personal judgments in favor of those who appear to be authority figures, even when they believed that the consequences would be terrible for other people.
Milgram called in his human subjects who were placed at a machine with a knob on it. They were told that the experiment was to test the effects of pain on the ability to learn, and were introduced to another ‘experiment subject’ who would be the one who was supposed to do the learning. In reality, the second subject was a confederate of Milgram who was in on the experiment, and who would not be getting hurt during the test.
The subjects were told that they were to quiz the ‘subject’ on a variety of questions, and when the ‘subject’ got an answer wrong, they were to turn the dial up a certain amount, at which time an electric shock would be administered to the ‘subject’ (who, of course, being Milgram’s associate, received no actual electrical shocks). The higher the knob was turned, the higher would be the purported magnitude of the electrical shock delivered.
The test began and Milgram found that people were more than willing to administer electric shocks to other people as part of the experiment, so he had his confederates start giving more wrong answers. People were willing to keep administering graver and graver electric shocks to the ‘subject,’ even after the ‘shocks’ were eliciting pretended shrieks of pain, convulsions, and total blackout.
Did anyone resist doing this? Yes, actually. Many people felt that they ought not to continue turning up the knob to administer electric shocks (particularly after the confederate appeared to go unconscious), but Milgram found, much to his surprise, that people could be exhorted to continue with the experiment if confronted with someone who appeared to be an authority (Milgram in a white lab coat with a clipboard or such, watching over them). Most people took little convincing. Milgram told them that they were absolutely free do stop the experiment if they wanted to, but they HAD agreed to do it, and the results of this study were important…
Virtually all of the subjects administering the fake electrical shocks continued administering shocks.
Being a jury foreperson is much like being the man in the white lab coat. Strangely enough, the decision of the jury foreperson is the final decision of the jury in a wide majority of cases. Why? Because the jury foreperson is seen as an authority figure when you step back into the jury deliberation room. He or she decides what is discussed, in what order, forges and breaks alliances, fortifies positions, abandons lines when assaulted strongly, and, generally engages in political machinations until the position he or she desires is the outcome.
But how do you get to be the jury foreperson and how can you use that position to your advantage? It is, quite surprisingly, almost playfully easy to get yourself placed into such a position, from where you can direct the deliberations like a puppet-play where only you know the script.
First, manage to get yourself seated in the traditional location of the jury foreperson in the jury box – the lower, left corner of the box if facing the jurors. Doing this is quite easy since that seat will usually be given to the last person to enter the jury box. Simply step out of the way of the door to the box and allow all others to enter before you. Not only does this make you appear to be a gentleman by allowing others to be seated first, but places you into the position where most jurors subconsciously expect to see the jury foreperson.
Secondly, when taken back to the jury deliberation room, seat yourself at the head of the table. White collar people are quite used to attending staff meetings and are used to regarding a person at the head of the table as the most important figure present. Blue collar workers are less likely to attend meetings of that nature, but are no less familiar with the concept that the authority figure sits at the head of the table in such a meeting. By placing yourself in this location, you can play off of people’s unconscious expectation that you must be the most important voice in these discussions. Words you say will be treated with greater weight than those of other people at the table, and as an apparent authority figure, people will defer to your views even over their own.
Thirdly, get in the first word. Don’t wait for others to start discussions when you sit down. Rather, take charge of the deliberations by declaring in a firm resolute voice (preferably from the head of the table) that the first item that needs to be accomplished is the selection of the jury foreperson. Most people will not want to be the jury foreperson, and simply by placing yourself at the head of the table and by taking command of the deliberations, you have nominated yourself and made the impression in their minds that this is a person who is organized and who gets things done. Their beliefs will make you into what they expect you to be.
Fourth, get someone on your side, and do the arguing through them. Don’t push your position. In the jury room, there is the phenomenon known as the ‘holdout juror,’ and common culture believes that these characters stick to their guns and don’t swing their vote. In reality, the holdout juror usually capitulates as soon as the other 11 have come to a consensus. Almost invariably, a single lone person on one side will give up their position to achieve peace in the jury room, even when they are *supposed* to be concerned more about deciding the case correctly. Lucky for you, you can use this knowledge to your advantage in two ways:
Don’t let yourself become the holdout juror. Do anything you need to in order to get at least one person on your side. This usually won’t be difficult since it would be a rare case indeed where the jury’s initial impression of the case was so lopsidedly skewed to one position or the other.
Don’t worry about a juror that you don’t know that you will be able to convince. Don’t flatly ignore what they have to say, but don’t waste your mental energy trying to convert them. When you convince the other 10, they will flip sides.
Once you have at least one person on your side, do your arguing through them. Whether they make the points you know they should be making or not, attribute the points to them. When the juror through whom you are arguing makes a point that is even tangentially related to the one that needs to be made, jump on it and ride it into the point you were going to make. Something like, “That’s a really good point, Sarah. You might also say that…” or “I think where Thomas was heading with that is…” Not only do people see you as not pushing your position (which they will begin to resent if you do), but they see you (the apparent authority figure) praising those who agree with the position you truly desire to see as the outcome. Additionally, the person on whom you lavish praise feels more important and will unconsciously engage in actions to elicit more praise from you, which feeds the cycle.
Fifthly, while the latin phrase “Nosce te ipsum” (know thyself) is a good thing to remember, when in the deliberation room, knowing yourself is less important than this: Know thy enemies. Which jurors are most committed to a position contrary to yours? Which jurors will be more easily swayed? Is the middle-aged woman a parent, indicating that she might be more sympathetic toward children’s issues? Is the retired gentleman army captain, indicating that he respects discipline and hierarchy? Engage in seemingly idle chit-chat during breaks to gauge the interests to which your enemies will be drawn, and use arguments implicating your foes’ interests against them. Don’t direct your argument to them, in discussions, or else they might recall that they told you specifically about being a PTA member or about their time on base in Germany. Instead address your arguments to some other member at the table, and the person to whom you are in truth addressing will less likely sense the machinations at work.
As well, in getting to know your enemies strengths and weaknesses, control the agenda. As jury foreperson, you can control which aspects of the case the table will discuss first and last. Put insignificant items first. You can use an excuse, saying something about just getting them out of the way before tackling the harder items, but in reality you should use these inconsequential parts of the case in order to determine how other jurors argue. Is juror number two prone to regressing to issues previously discussed? If so, note her positions on various issues. Allow her to drag the table back to issues that you think need more discussing, and keep her on topic when you think the previous issue has been decided as you want it. Does juror nine seem unable to differentiate between evidence and his own speculations? If so, craft a little two- or three-sentence speech about how to judge the evidence that you can give before moving into the seriously controversial parts of the case. Once you know who your opponents are and how they argue, use their strengths and weaknesses to feed your points or damage the other side.
Sixth, be courteous as can be. Hold open doors for people. Don’t interrupt them unless absolutely necessary. When you head to the courthouse, dress nicely. Make good eye contact with them whenever possible. Nod your head as if listening intently to what they say even when you are thinking to yourself that this person must have been napping through half the trial. If you get up to get yourself a coffee from the machine invariably in deliberation rooms, audibly offer to get a cup for the people sitting next to you. To quote a saying I heard long ago, few people suspect that the devil wears fine clothes. As silly as it seems, people have a hard time believing that they are being manipulated by someone whom they like.
Lastly, get unanimous consent every single time that something has been decided the way you want it to be decided. Even if someone disagrees personally with the decision being made, their personal judgment now must fight against not only the subconscious desire to please the apparent authority figure, but also must fight against the fact that they publicly declared to all of the people in the jury room that they agreed to some position already decided. If later, their personal judgment starts to creep back in and Juror John says something like, “I just don’t feel right about assessing damages in that amount,” you (as the jury foreperson) can say something like, “Well, we’ve already discussed that point, and I thought that we had all come to some sort of agreement on the appropriate amount. Would you like us to go back to that point again?” This is the equivalent of Milgram in his white lab coat giving the subject permission to end the experiment, but politely reminding the subject that they had, in fact, agreed to participate and that there are negative consequences to others should you go back on your word (in the experiment, the results of the experiment wouldn’t be as good, and in the jury room, John will be faced with the prospect that jurors may be angry with him for dragging them all back to an issue already decided). Juror John will likely desire to not drag the whole room back into an issue that he already agreed to, and will more likely just have the group go on with whatever you had them discussing at the time.
Well, today, I got to put all of my little tricks into play. The jury was 4-1 against me when we entered the jury room. I was able to sway a single juror to my side with some easy arguments, by aiming at the one who was most torn between the positions. With a person on my side, it was a short, downhill ride to convince the aged mother of three to vote for the defense (even though she was the mother of one of the one of the attorneys for the prosecution). The real challenge was convincing another girl (who was the wife of that self-same attorney), but by arguing through the girl who I had managed to convert right off the bat, I was able to set up a duel of wits between them, knowing that the one on my side had more sophisticated weaponry at her disposal. Once I had her on board, the fifth jury member simply switched sides and we were able to sign the jury form for the defense.
Fantastic. The only downside is that I’m fairly sure this whole entry proves that I’m evil.
