Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times via AP
The jury box in the Santa Barbara County courthouse in Santa Maria, California
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: Wesleyan University professor of government Sonali Chakravarti considers questions of emotions, the law and democratic institutions. In the context of the present divisiveness these questions she studies are most salient: What is the purpose of the expression of anger in public life? How do we listen to rage?
Author of the new University of Chicago volume “Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life,” Chakravarti offers what she calls a full-throated defense of juries as a democratic institution, writing that juries provide an important site for democratic action by citizens and that should be revived. She adds, “the jury could be a forward-looking institution that nurtures the best democratic instincts of citizens but this requires a change in civic education, regarding the skills that should be cultivated in jurors before and through the process of a trial.”
I was struck by that introduction, a model of civic education and also accountability of your fellow peer, your neighbor.
Sonali Chakravarti: I am very interested in how ordinary people engage with political institutions and juries are the place where ordinary people have the most power. They actually make the final decision about whether someone should be punished or not. I called my book “Radical Enfranchisement” because when we think of enfranchisement we usually think of voting and kind of extending the vote to women, to black people.
But we also should think about how enfranchisement means being able to serve on a jury, which means that the state trusts you to make this most important decision about the fate a of a peer or a neighbor. And when we think about it, the fact that the state trusts us to do that means that we have the cognitive capacities, the capacities of empathy, the capacities of understanding the law, that we’re not called upon to use in any other, in many other moments.
Jury service is the most demanding thing we do as citizens. But it is also one of the most satisfying things that we do. Studies have shown that people who serve on juries leave with a deeper appreciation of the criminal justice system. They know its flaws, and right now a lot of people are talking about the need for a major reform of the criminal justice process. And I agree with that. But people who serve on juries come out saying that there’s a lot that’s right about the trial format. And they are ennobled by the power that they have as jurors.
Heffner: And often I don’t think it’s highlighted enough, Sonali, that to say a society is free really demands that it has this process by judging people’s guilt and innocence, a jury of your peers, not only like you say, traditional enfranchisement. To be a free society, the jury system is something we take for granted, but we ought not to.
Chakravarti: Exactly. And because the jury is the only place where you have people who are not repeat players in the process of punishment, right? Otherwise, you have lawyers, judges, prosecutors, police…
Heffner: Lobbyists…
Chakravarti: Lobbyists, right? And so to use your language of a free society, right, there needs to be some check on that system such that it’s not putting forward goals that are not democratic or trying to use a state for abusive purposes. We need some check on—are the people who have power within the justice system within the political system? And the you know, the Founders brought over the idea of the jury from England, from the common law tradition because they saw that that is the one way to ensure that that doesn’t happen, that it’s the best check on corruption.
It’s the best check on abuse of power. I once presented a paper on juries in China and many of the Chinese scholars that were there were saying, we’re never going to have a full-scale jury system. You know the, the Chinese Communist Party’s never going to allow that. But a few people are saying, we’re, dealing with corruption at a really high level and you can’t just expect the party to police itself.
We need ordinary people in there to decide whether this was corruption and whether it should be punished. So it’s the sense that like the system only works if we, if you have some body of people that don’t have other interests, keeping their jobs, keeping a salary, moving forward in their careers who are making these very important decisions about punishment.
