Cops Are the Reason I Get Excused from Jury Duty
The last few times I've been called for jury duty at the Baltimore City Circuit Court, I haven't made it past the voir dire. What happens is:
- They ask if anyone would not believe the testimony of a witness because they are a police officer.
- I raise my hand, and somebody notes who I am.
- I later go before the judge and lawyers for the defense and prosecution and they ask for an explanation.
- I give them my explanation.
- The judge sends me home.
[The answer I give is a little abbreviated, because they're in a hurry to convict somebody, but we've got plenty of space here, so I'll tell the full story.]
The first thing I say is that I read the news. They all nod sagely and remember that our police have been caught lying in court and committing crimes so often that the city has a list of cops who specifically should never be called to testify, and everyone in town is suspicious of the rest. I'll allow you a moment to think about why all those cops still have jobs.
Then I tell them the story of the two times I got mugged in three months.
In late 2014, my wife Shelley and I had gotten into the (now mostly debunked) idea of getting 10,000 steps. We started doing a lot of walking, and watching what we ate. We walked not just for exercise, but as part of scouting out a neighborhood near where we lived that we wanted to move to. In the summer of 2015, we bought a house in that neighborhood and moved in, and continued to walk around our new neighborhood for our health.
I had lost a bunch of weight with all the walking, mostly because I was counting calories. I got down to 195 pounds. and people told me that I looked great, but I was hungry all the time: dreams about food, constant hunger pangs, and not loving life. But this is America, and nothing is more important than being thin, right? (No.)
As a programmer, there isn't a lot of walking around at work, so I took to going on long walks in the evening, either with Shelley or alone, and having spent a lot time looking at the crime stats in my neighborhood, I felt very safe. I mean, we were steps away from artisanal kombucha and raw vegan chocolate — what could happen? So you can imagine my surprise when I was out for a walk on a foggy evening around 5:00pm in early November and suddenly woke up on the ground in pain and bleeding.
I was on the sidewalk on the south side of Northern Parkway north of Belvedere Square Market. Taking stock of the situation, my phone and wallet were missing, my nose was bleeding, my ribs were aching, and the back of my head and face hurt terribly. An unhoused guy I said met and given money to ran up and helped me to a local bar on the corner, Swallow at the Hollow, where they called an ambulance for me and let me call my wife. The unhoused guy explained that 4 kids had run up behind me, knocked me down, and beat me up on the ground before running off. I had no memory of any of that. The ambulance took me to the hospital where I had two black eyes, a broken nose, a cut inside my lip that needed stitches, a concussion and some cracked ribs. I also had abrasions from the concrete on my face and wrist. (Here's a truly awful picture of my face taken that night.) It sucked a lot. I gave a very uninformative statement to a detective who showed up, and that was that.
A small side story: because I needed to be able to drive, I went to the MVA (that's the DMV for a state that's located in the DMV) to get a new license. It was midday and things were very slow, so I asked the lady who tells you which line to stand in if I could reuse the photo from the license I had just gotten 3 months before. She said that I could...If the self-serve kiosks were working, but they were not. I had to get a new picture. I explained that I needed a license because mine had been stolen when my face got all banged up. She told me that her brother had ben standing outside his apartment building talking to a friend when a man walked past, entered the building, came back out with a knife, and stabbed him to death from behind. So this is the photo I got to carry in my wallet and show people for 6 years, and that's when I learned not to complain to anyone in Baltimore: they've probably got it worse.
I went home and thought about what happened. Violent crime is pretty low in my part of Baltimore — low enough that it's a lot like being struck by lightning. That means there aren't many lessons to be learned, and nobody in particular to blame. I figured that the best thing I could do would be to just keep living my life. I healed up, tried not to think about the whole affair, and kept walking.
Near the end of January, 2016 we had a snowstorm in Baltimore that closed schools. In the afternoon, I decided to walk to the grocery store and get some more steps in. As I got to the end of my block, I saw four teens having a snowball fight. I smiled and waved and headed toward the store. I made it 150 or so feet before the kids grabbed me, hit me in the face with the butt of a pistol twice. I fell to the ground leaned up against a car, and they demanded "it." I asked what they meant, and they specified my phone, and hit me again. I produced the phone and they demanded the passcode. I said, "I knew what it was before you started hitting me," at which point the held he gun to my temple and cocked the hammer.
I told them the passcode, but it was long and confusing and I may have gotten it a little wrong. They decided it was good enough, and three of them ran off with the phone laughing, while the kid with the gun held to my head looked at me, smiled, stole my hat, and ran away.
I ran home through the alleys to avoid seeing these kids again, and Shelley and I took an ambulance to a different hospital. They patched up my face as best they could and offered me some morphine for the pain. I said to the doctor that redheads usually need 25% more anesthetic to get the same relief, and he pulled back his surgical gear to reveal a head of red hair and said, "they're also more used to dealing with pain." I shut up and waited for the morphine to kick in. When it didn't they gave me more. Then they gave me the maximum safe dose. Then they told me that I'm probably one of those people that don't get any relief at all from morphine. Good to know, I guess?
After they gave me some Percocet (which I later threw up - I can't use oxycontin OR morphine, it turns out), I talked to a detective who took my story and told me to go to the Northern District police station once I felt better. A day later, I showed up to talk to the police there, told them how these kids brought a gun to a snowball fight, and gave them my idiosyncratic descriptions: "one looked a lot like Shock G from Digital Underground but with really kind eyes." After listening to the story, they told me that they were sure they knew the group that did it, and they would look into it. They, and I, were pretty sure that the kids who mugged me his time were the same as the ones who mugged me the time before. I gave them my contact details and waited to be called to testify.
And waited. And waited And waited...
...Until 2017 when the 8 officers of the infamous Gun Trace Task Force were arrested for racketeering and a host of other criminal activities. If you haven't heard about them, there are books and an HBO show about the whole affair. One of the details that came out was that one of the officers had been giving the drugs he stole from drug dealers to a gang he set up at the shopping center around the corner from me, and arming them with stolen guns. That was the shopping center I had been heading to the second time I got mugged, and we had been avoiding it since because everyone in our neighborhood knew there was a gang selling heroine in the parking lot and hassling people.
After the arrest, the drugs ran out and the gang disappeared. I realized why the police knew who had mugged me, and also why they hadn't done anything about it. The officer in question is now out of jail and active on social media telling a story about redemption and his newfound faith. Meanwhile, the detective who took my statement after the second mugging also went to jail on unrelated corruption charges.
Usually after you do voir dire, if you're excused they send you back to the waiting rooms to be called for another trial. After hearing my story, the judges just tell me to go home.
To be very clear, no matter how much you hate jury duty, I don't encourage you to take this as advice. On the other hand, having had my nose broken 4 times, the best way to straighten it is to get up first thing each morning, look in the mirror, place your index fingers on either side of your nose and shove it into the right position.
