We Should Not Need a Courtroom: Part Three

Part Three: The Stay-at-Home Jurors

I heard someone use the phrase stay-at-home jurors, and I have not stopped thinking about it.

The trial was livestreamed, and people watched it the way they watch everything now: in pieces, on their phones, between other things. They watched a witness, saw a clip, read someone else’s interpretation, and formed an opinion.

Social media has given people the sense that watching part of a trial qualifies them to decide the whole case. The opinions that determined the verdict belonged to the jurors who were actually there.

Think about what a juror does. Jurors sit through weeks of testimony. They hear the evidence that the court has determined they may consider. They receive instructions about the law and the burden of proof, and they are required to follow those instructions even when the law does not match their instincts.

Then they deliberate with other people who also heard the whole case. They have to explain their thinking, listen to disagreement, and remain open to changing their minds.

Afterward, they go home and live with the decision.

People watching from home carry none of that responsibility. They can skip testimony, turn it off, return later, or rely on clips selected by someone else. They do not have to apply the legal standard. They do not have to deliberate with anyone. Their conclusions have no effect on the verdict.

Still, they often become certain very quickly.

Certainty feels the same from the inside whether or not we have enough information to support it. Nothing warns us that our opinion is underinformed. The person who sat through every day of testimony and the person who watched a few minutes before bed can feel equally sure.

That brings me to the difference between compassion and judgment, which is the part I most want readers to sit with.

When an older person comes out of surgery confused, agitated, or paranoid, perhaps accusing a family member of something terrible, we may recognize delirium. We understand that something has happened to the person’s brain. When the delirium clears, we are usually able to place the behavior inside the illness.

We can understand that with delirium, a high fever, dangerously low blood sugar, or a stroke that temporarily changes someone’s personality and behavior.

We become less generous when the person is a mother.

Motherhood gets treated as an identity, so anything a mother does, under almost any condition, becomes evidence of who she really was. That is why so many people kept asking how a mother could stop loving her children.

I think that is the wrong question to ask about a psychiatric emergency.

I know that none of these medical examples carries the weight of what happened in this case. I am interested in how we assign meaning to behavior. In some conditions, we recognize that the brain has been altered. In others, we decide the behavior reveals the person’s character.

So I keep asking myself the same question.

If you entered a state in which your perception, judgment, and behavior were profoundly unlike you, how would you want other people to understand that period? Would you want the worst moment of your life replayed by strangers as proof of who you had always been?

The legal system has a specific job. It determines what happened and then applies the law of that jurisdiction to questions of intent, capacity, and criminal responsibility. Having a psychiatric diagnosis does not answer those questions. The law considers what a severe mental illness did to the person’s ability to understand the nature or wrongfulness of the conduct at the time.

Those are narrow and difficult questions. The public discussion often skipped them.

People moved quickly from believing that she committed the acts to believing they understood her intent, her capacity, her relationship with her children, and the person she had been before that day.

They had pieces of the story. They felt certain anyway.

That is what I keep thinking about when I hear the phrase stay-at-home jurors.

Part Four, We Still Do Not Know Enough, comes Friday.

For free, confidential support during or after pregnancy, call or text the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-852-6262. Call or text 988 during a mental health crisis. If someone is in immediate danger or appears to be experiencing postpartum psychosis, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department.