Recess time!
I'm familiar with recess --- I used to be a teacher. The kids love recess. Time to jump and run and holler and play with friends. Time to talk to whoever you want to and make things up and test your skills or even just sit on top of the monkey bars and talk to your best friend. Wait! Strike that last one. Not too many monkey bars left on playgrounds these days.
No, recess from the courtroom is not the same. Every interruption to the proceedings is prefaced with instructions from the judge to the jury not to talk about the case with anybody, not even each other. There's a whole list of DO NOTs ---- recess is probably not much fun.
As a matter of fact, there's been nothing fun about this brush with our system of justice that I'm experiencing with my friend Joanna's trial. I've written about her here and here. Nothing alters the fact that one person is dead, one person killed him, and many, many lives have been shattered. But it does seem, from a friend and observer's point of view, that our method for sorting the whole situation out is almost as messy as the incident itself.
I've been to court myself only twice, once to get a divorce in 1975 before no-fault was invented. Once to testify in a friend's custody hearing. The rest of my courtroom experience has come from the teevee, starting with Perry Mason. It might not be the most accurate learning environment.
My biggest surprise with Joanna's trial has been that, despite my best intentions and repeated attempts to attend, I've been excluded from the courtroom at every turn. Somehow, magically, without my knowledge, I was included by the prosecution on a list of potential witnesses. That meant I got summarily removed each time I showed up. Not courteously, either.
So I wound up watching the trial on the livestream broadcast on my tv at home. Couch. Snacks. Dogs. Jammies. It wasn't all bad, but it wasn't how I expected or wanted things to be. I fully expected that "open court" meant what it said. There was apparently no intention of calling me or the vast majority of other people on that list. But it certainly had the effect of removing any support for Joanna in the courtroom. See how bad she is? Nobody even comes to see her.
What's my take-away so far? I have come face to face with my own privilege. I'm a well-educated white woman, over a certain age. I walk in the world with privilege I don't recognize ---- until it is challenged. My encounters with people in power who showed me no respect, no courtesy, and in fact left me feeling bullied and helpless, were a slap in the face to my complacency. I'm someone who weighs my words, who constantly seeks to expand my perspective, listens to the experiences of others, puts myself in another person's shoes. I have acknowledged the privilege I have because I thought it out; it's an intellectual construct that I recognize. But not until someone speaks to me unnecessarily harshly, as though I am both slow-witted and without value, backed up by the hulking presence of a uniformed officer of the court, do I experience the inverse of my assumptions about who I am. It is a startling, humiliating moment.
In my world, grown people speak to each other politely. I naively assume that everyone will do that, unless there's extreme provocation to behave otherwise. But that's not true. For a short time, I felt helpless in the face of power, unable to assert anything that would change the situation, and I was indignant, outraged, bewildered.
Privilege means that I go through life assuming that people I meet will be reasonable, if not polite then at least civil. That I will usually get my way because I am also a reasonable, civilized person.
I won't say it was good that this ADA felt she had the right to be mean and hiss at me. (That's what it felt like.) But it was good to be able to later think about what happened and realize that, for one thing, this is Joanna's life for the last two years and three months. If she is convicted and sent to prison, it's her life for the forseeable future, a life in which she is not valued for any of her accomplishments or who she is, but judged and categorized, labeled a convict and devalued accordingly.
It's not just inmates, is it? It's anybody who encounters the diminution of their humanity based on superficial characteristics. It's the conversation that never truly starts and cannot ever end --- race, color, religion, gender, nationality, on and on and on.
Recess will be over on Monday 9/28/15, 9:30 AM. The closing arguments will be heard. The jury will be instructed and dismissed to their deliberations. The wait will commence and sooner or later, judgment will be delivered. Guilty? Innocent? Either way, she is still a worthy human being, a person, not a label. Just like all the rest of us.
My biggest surprise with Joanna's trial has been that, despite my best intentions and repeated attempts to attend, I've been excluded from the courtroom at every turn. Somehow, magically, without my knowledge, I was included by the prosecution on a list of potential witnesses. That meant I got summarily removed each time I showed up. Not courteously, either.
So I wound up watching the trial on the livestream broadcast on my tv at home. Couch. Snacks. Dogs. Jammies. It wasn't all bad, but it wasn't how I expected or wanted things to be. I fully expected that "open court" meant what it said. There was apparently no intention of calling me or the vast majority of other people on that list. But it certainly had the effect of removing any support for Joanna in the courtroom. See how bad she is? Nobody even comes to see her.
What's my take-away so far? I have come face to face with my own privilege. I'm a well-educated white woman, over a certain age. I walk in the world with privilege I don't recognize ---- until it is challenged. My encounters with people in power who showed me no respect, no courtesy, and in fact left me feeling bullied and helpless, were a slap in the face to my complacency. I'm someone who weighs my words, who constantly seeks to expand my perspective, listens to the experiences of others, puts myself in another person's shoes. I have acknowledged the privilege I have because I thought it out; it's an intellectual construct that I recognize. But not until someone speaks to me unnecessarily harshly, as though I am both slow-witted and without value, backed up by the hulking presence of a uniformed officer of the court, do I experience the inverse of my assumptions about who I am. It is a startling, humiliating moment.
In my world, grown people speak to each other politely. I naively assume that everyone will do that, unless there's extreme provocation to behave otherwise. But that's not true. For a short time, I felt helpless in the face of power, unable to assert anything that would change the situation, and I was indignant, outraged, bewildered.
Privilege means that I go through life assuming that people I meet will be reasonable, if not polite then at least civil. That I will usually get my way because I am also a reasonable, civilized person.
I won't say it was good that this ADA felt she had the right to be mean and hiss at me. (That's what it felt like.) But it was good to be able to later think about what happened and realize that, for one thing, this is Joanna's life for the last two years and three months. If she is convicted and sent to prison, it's her life for the forseeable future, a life in which she is not valued for any of her accomplishments or who she is, but judged and categorized, labeled a convict and devalued accordingly.
It's not just inmates, is it? It's anybody who encounters the diminution of their humanity based on superficial characteristics. It's the conversation that never truly starts and cannot ever end --- race, color, religion, gender, nationality, on and on and on.
Recess will be over on Monday 9/28/15, 9:30 AM. The closing arguments will be heard. The jury will be instructed and dismissed to their deliberations. The wait will commence and sooner or later, judgment will be delivered. Guilty? Innocent? Either way, she is still a worthy human being, a person, not a label. Just like all the rest of us.
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