The weeklong jury selection process was a pressure cooker for many of the nearly 300 Manhattan residents who were summoned to be interviewed. Photo / Maansi Srivastava, The New York Times
The weeklong jury selection process was a pressure cooker for many of the nearly 300 Manhattan residents who were summoned to be interviewed. Photo / Maansi Srivastava, The New York Times
Two prospective jurors who were excused contacted The New York Times to describe their experience in the fraught environment of an unprecedented trial.
The two Manhattan residents were led into the courtroom to fulfil a foundational civic duty: to be interviewed as prospective jurors.
But in the room whenthey arrived was a defendant, Donald Trump, unlike any in US history.
Both would-be jurors, a man and a woman, were eventually excused. But the experience thrust them into the spotlight in a way they never had imagined.
One was challenged by Trump’s lawyers over his past social media posts relating to the former president. The other has a medical practice that she could not shut for six weeks while serving on the jury.
While they were not chosen as jurors, their experiences illustrate the intensity of the attention focused on Trump’s trial — and on the first jury to ever weigh the fate of a former US president in a criminal proceeding.
Both contacted The New York Times only after they were excused from serving. Although the court’s rules protecting prospective jurors’ identities end when they are dismissed from serving, the Times is withholding their names and most identifying characteristics about them.
Like the other prospective jurors who were considered, both included detailed personal information on the juror questionnaires they filled out, including where they work.
They were made to answer those questions by speaking into a microphone in open court; soon, both were blindsided as details of their lives ricocheted around the internet. They said they were frustrated that so much attention was devoted to prospective jurors and ascertaining information about them.
While they later learned that the judge in the case, Justice Juan Merchan, had ordered the redaction of some of the information jurors were ordered to reveal publicly, they felt that he had acted too late. As with many things connected to the trial, the rhythms and even some of the parameters are being written in real time.
Their experiences mirrored some that other prospective jurors who were dismissed have described. One, a man who gave his name as Mark to NBC News, said he had “satirised Mr Trump often in my artwork,” and because of that, he had expected not to be chosen.
A woman who gave her name as Kara, who said the nature of her job made serving extremely difficult, told NBC News that she realised the gravity of serving on any criminal jury, but particularly this one.
Seeing Trump in person, she said, was “very jarring.” He was, she realised, just “another guy.”
One of the prospective jurors who spoke with the Times, the man, did not immediately realise what case he was involved in when he was led into the courtroom on the 15th floor of the Manhattan criminal courthouse. The woman had a sense a week earlier, having read a news story about the trial beginning the week she was supposed to respond to a juror summons.
The man, sitting a few rows behind the prosecutors’ table when the two were part of the first panel of 96 prospective jurors brought into the courtroom Monday afternoon, felt a sense of calm about five minutes into being there. Trump was simply a defendant, he thought. It was a business-records trial. Prosecutors were on one side, the defence lawyers on the other.
The jury box at State Supreme court in Manhattan, where a jury of 12 New Yorkers will decide whether former President Donald Trump falsified business records. Photo / Jefferson Siegel, The New York Times
The woman was struck by the fact that Trump stood and waved to prospective jurors, she said, as he and his lawyers were introduced to the group. It felt more to her like the behaviour of a campaigning candidate than of a criminal defendant. (Trump, of course, is both.)
Both were put off by efforts by Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, to assess prospective jurors’ views of Trump. The man said Blanche seemed “folksy” in a way he found disingenuous, while the woman was sharper, describing a “witch hunt” to root out people sympathetic to Democrats on the panel — a phrase Trump uses often to criticise the various prosecutors investigating his conduct.
The man in particular was frustrated that he was asked about past social media posts in which he had been critical of Trump, which Blanche’s team raised and which Merchan ultimately agreed meant the man should be excused.
The man believed he could have been fair and resented the implication that he could not have been. Both he and the woman, who said they believed in the system of jury service, noted that they had begun the day taking sworn oaths vowing to render a fair and impartial judgment on the evidence. The man believed his own views — especially views from years ago — had no bearing on his ability to judge the evidence. If anything, he said, he would have been hyper-conscious in doing so.
Both had realised the magnitude of what serving on that jury would mean.
But they were also conscious of the threats and blowback that could come with weighing evidence against Trump — particularly with their personal details traceable in public. And both had concerns about being chosen because of that; the man in particular said his spouse had been worried.
Both would have valued being part of the historic trial. But both also had a sense of relief that they were not picked.
