twelve people go off
in a room – different hearts
minds, shapes, eyes and ears
Twelve people go off into a room.
Twelve different hearts, twelve different minds, from twelve different walks of life — twelve sets of eyes and ears, shapes and sizes.
And these twelve people have to judge another human being as different from them as they are from each other — and in their judgment they must become of one mind — unanimous.
It’s one of the miracles of man’s disorganized soul that they can do it — and most of the time do it right well.
God bless juries.
From the movie Anatomy of a Murder screenplay by Wendell Mayes From the novel by Robert Traver.
The book is based on a case from the Upper Pennisula of Michigan.
The author, a Judge from the UP writes in the forward that, “I longed to try my hand at telling about a criminal trial the way it really was, and, after my years of immersion, I felt equally strongly that a great part of the tension and drama of any major felony trial lay in its very understatement, its pent and almost stifled quality, not in the usually portrayed shoutings and stompings and assorted finger-waggings that almost inevitably accompanied the sudden appearance and subsequent grilling of that monotonously dependable last-minute witness. …“
It is one of the co-stars, Arthur O’Connell, as Parnell McCarthy who sits back and delivers this quiet speech on juries.
Today, I couldn’t agree more.
God Bless Juries.
No Haiku For You 