Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP
Former President Donald Trump appears at Manhattan Criminal Court during jury deliberations in his criminal hush-money trial in New York, May 30, 2024.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right of all accused criminals to a trial by a jury of their peers. Donald Trump doesn’t believe he has any peers, let alone that 12 ordinary people should be able to dictate the circumstances of his penthouse life. He was wrong, and a means of delivering long-lost accountability in America was rediscovered, by stepping outside the class of elites who have failed in their role, and letting people chosen by lot decide.
There was a time during the running crime wave that has characterized the 21st century, amid unpunished torture and public corruption and financial fraud, where it was expressed that juries were simply too unsophisticated for the difficult business of holding criminal activity accountable. This was an excuse particularly fitted for the financial crisis, with its collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Juries couldn’t possibly understand the complexities of modern finance, let alone modern law; their eyes will glaze over and the prosecution will lose.
One case actually revealed that argument for the pabulum it was: the 2013 prosecution of Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, a mid-level Goldman Sachs trader, for securities fraud. It was a civil trial alleging that Tourre sold investors structured mortgage bonds while concealing the self-interest of the hedge fund, Paulson & Co., on the other side of the bet. Fabulous Fab wasn’t a major decision-maker at Goldman; if anything, he was a scapegoat. Anyway, this trial wouldn’t even put him in prison. (Tourre paid $825,000; he’s now an assistant professor at Baruch College.)
The jury knew that Tourre wasn’t the mastermind of the scheme. They knew he was being served up as a useful foil because his name was on a bunch of boastful emails. But they dug down and did their job, determining that the lack of disclosure was indeed a material misrepresentation to investors, whether Tourre led the effort or merely followed. There was a wonderful line said by one of the jurors, a priest named Rev. Beth Glover, after the case. She said, “They portrayed him as a cog, but in the end a machine is made up of cogs and he was a willing part of that.”
We’re at a stage with our criminal justice system where dispassionate application of law has to be celebrated. Too many prosecutors fear the consequences of losing a case as a higher priority than the job description of ensuring that crime has consequences. Too many judges, living in the same neighborhoods and going to the same schools as the white-collar defense lawyers in nice suits before their court, reason themselves out of delivering accountability. Media elites didn’t even want the Trump hush-money case to be filed; it wasn’t serious enough to rise to some Aaron Sorkin conception of bringing the mighty low.
It took jurors, those untutored jurors of varied backgrounds and classes, to pay attention, follow instructions, and issue a verdict. They were the only ones not marinated in the strange courtesies and protocols of the legal system, the only ones not concerned with their good standing in the eyes of their peers (I don’t mean peers as in jury members, but only those in their legal rarified air). The people who seem to be most serious about the law are not the ones who view it more as a debating society, but the ones who actually hear the evidence and reach conclusions.
This is not the only instance highlighting the importance of juries as a way to break the run of impunity in America. Google was found guilty of being a monopoly in a private antitrust case by a jury in San Francisco; the judge looking at the same question in D.C. district court inexplicably delayed closing arguments for six months and still hasn’t decided the case. Rather than being caught up with anguish over personal reputation or precedent-setting value, the jury responded that yeah, Google has a monopoly over app distribution on Android phones, that it used that power to take tolls for purchases made over the apps, and that this was anti-competitive. Just answering those questions was a revolutionary act.
Public disquiet about the state of the nation as “a dying empire led by bad people,” in the words of one pollster, is in my view connected to this ingrained belief that who you are matters more than what you did, that there are different justice systems for different people depending on their power and influence. At least some Americans simmering about that fact sit on juries, and get to have a voice in shaping that outcome, at least in their own sphere. I don’t beatify the jury, so much as I do a system that allows the facts of law to be worked through outside of the realities of privilege.
If we still had civics classes in America, one lesson would be taken up with discussing how, in this country, “nobody is above the law.” That hasn’t been true for a while, and a Trump guilty verdict doesn’t really change that; as others have said, there will be appeals, and the men in robes will get their chance to hold forth. What the verdict does show is that accountability, in the fleeting moments when it comes to the elites of this nation, has the face of the bartender and the nurse and the electrician. Justice is blind, but more so in the jury box.
