I was one of nine jurors selected to decide a case brought against a young man accused of making terrorist threats against a high school he had attended. It’s a daunting task to determine the fate of someone you’ve never met and of whom you know nothing. You listen carefully to the lawyers, the judge, and the instructions and evidence, and eventually you find yourself seated in a jury room with your peers.
Yet while we were all members of the defendant's community, I'm not sure anyone would describe any member of that jury as a peer of the accused. There was the kind-hearted psychiatric nurse from the Veterans Hospital. There was a young data analyst who became our technology expert when we wanted to review electronic evidence. Our foreperson was a retired trucking business owner whose wife had died less than a year ago.
The quiet guy with a long, bushy black beard studies philosophy at the university and needed a note to present to a professor whose test he missed. Other than that, he never spoke. The blond-haired lady did accounting. She asked several good questions during the trial and admitted, smiling, that she was thrilled to not have to go to the office during tax season. She suggested that either the business owner or I should be the foreperson since we both had experience on juries, and I quickly agreed the other guy would be perfect.
There was a young man who did sound system design for a company he co-owned. He had great hearing and deciphered some of the garbled evidence for us. One lady was declared an alternate juror and sent home. She was thrilled because her sixth-grade son had forgotten his soccer uniform and was stranded at school since he wasn’t permitted to play without it. During breaks she’d been frantically trying to find someone to pick him up, and now she could go herself. “The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” she muttered as she was leaving, “and he better move to save my son from his momma’s wrath.” We all chuckled.
Then there was the loud-mouthed retiree who knew everything about everything and wasn’t shy about sharing his opinions with everyone, whether we wanted to hear them or not. He had wanted to be the foreperson and suggested a secret ballot vote. The businessman got seven votes. He got one—probably his own.
None of us were peers of each other, let alone peers of a 22-year-old who played video games all night long, hung a torn, badly burned gay pride flag on the wall above the couch where he slept in a friend’s apartment, and threatened to blow up a school and kill all the LGBTQ+ students he could. None of us would have ever drawn a map of a campus with the ideal areas to place bombs carefully marked in red, or would have posted a picture of the pipe bomb we had constructed on Instagram. We wouldn’t have thought to use VPN and a voice modulator to make scary phone calls. We’re not peers.
But we were called on to judge him as his peers and come to a verdict. We did. Guilty as charged.
On the way home I wept for him. So very sad. A life ruined by hate. From where does such evil arise?
It dawned on me as I turned on to my street that, short of God’s profound mercy, I truly am his peer.