Doing time
Today: Sarah Weinman, author of Without Consent, Scoundrel, and The Real Lolita.
Issue No. 530
A Grand Juror in New York City
Sarah Weinman
A Grand Juror in New York City
by Sarah Weinman
My grand jury summons arrived in the mail on a Friday afternoon, hours after I’d turned in final edits on a new book. Men trakht, Gott lakht (Yiddish for “man plans, God laughs”) resounded in my head. Here I had just finished months of grueling work on a book about rape trials, including one I’d sat through in person in a different state, and now I was being called to serve as a juror myself. But I was also strangely elated. What were the odds that I, a crime writer—whose prior jury duty experience consisted of sitting around in a room for hours and being dismissed early, never having been picked—would end up serving on a grand jury?
Pretty high, as it turned out. They picked me because they pick almost everybody selected for grand jury duty; fewer than 30,000 get that summons in New York County each year, compared to nearly 600,000 tasked for regular jury (or “petit jury,” in official parlance). Excuses can work for avoiding grand jury duty, if you can’t find childcare, or you are a caregiver. You might get lucky if you’re seated farther away from the front or if your name doesn’t come up in the name lottery. Mine did, though, in the first batch.
Which is how I spent two weeks in March 2025 clocking in every morning at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse at 100 Centre Street to serve alongside twenty-two other jurors in hearing dozens of cases. By a fluke, I became the assistant foreperson, basically an understudy but mostly a sounding board: I’d gone to the wrong room first, and all the other seats had been taken.
Former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Sol Wachtler once famously cracked that district attorneys could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. By the end of my term I would be able to see the truth of that, or otherwise, for myself. As it turned out, we did indict every human whose alleged crimes came before us, because we had reasonable cause to believe they committed crimes. But that doesn’t make the system kosher.
Grand jury proceedings are supposed to stay secret. According to the slim green handbook each of us received on our first day of service, “The purposes of grand jury secrecy are to obtain the full cooperation of the witnesses who appear before the grand jury, to permit grand jurors to make decisions free from outside interference, and to protect an innocent person who may be investigated but never indicted.” Revealing details of this work is a class E felony that could lead to prison time.
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