The Pervasiveness of Violence Against Women

I was called for jury service today. On other occasions when I've been called, all I did was sit in the jury selection room on the sixth floor of the courthouse and wait. I was never asked to report to a courtroom. Today was different: From 7:45-9:30I sat, but then I was told to report, along with about 50 or so other potential jurors, to the third floor. The trial was for a Latino man in his mid- to late 40s who was charged with multiple counts of child molestation and rape of two minors between 1998 and 2007. The girls are now 15 and 17, so that would have made them 3 and 5 when the alleged molestation began. As the charges were read, I was close to tears.

The judge instructed the potential jurors as a group and individual ones as they were questioned that we should not pass any judgments based on the number of charges or the duration of the alleged abuse. She said that she had presided over a burglary case with more than 30 charges, but if the police arrested innocent men, they are innocent regardless of the number of charges. She also made it clear that this is a difficult case for most people to hear, but just because it is difficult doesn't mean it's impossible for someone to listen to the facts and decide upon the facts. She said that she is not asking jurors to be emotionless zombies, only to not allow their emotions to decide the case. All good instructions.

From 9:30-11:15 and then 1:30-3:45, jury selection took place. The defense attorney used maybe 15 of his challenges for cause or peremptory challenges to exclude jurors. Some of these challenges I understood as the candidates seemed to have a strong bias in the case. Others were harder to understand, but I suppose the defense attorney was looking for a certain type, whatever that was. The prosecutor just eliminated two potential jurors, a man whose uncle had been acquited of child molestation charges and a woman whose brother was serving an excessive sentence for burglary in Colorado. I was never questioned, and when 12 jurors and four alternates were finally selected and sworn in, I was free to go.

The two things that really struck me were how many people have attorneys or law-enforcement officers in their family and how many families have been touched by rape and molestation. Two men were excluded because their grandmothers had been raped and murdered; another man because his wife had been raped as a child and was still suffering from it; a woman whose grandmother had been murdered and her cousin raped, causing her so much trauma that she was institutionalized for most of her life; a school principal and a pediatric nurse who frequently dealt with children who had been molested; three women who left the jury box in tears because of the rapes or molestations of their family members, on and on and on. It really makes you wonder how many sick men are out there and what is it about our society that makes them so sick.