A JURY TRIAL is a constitutional right and the best way we’ve come up with to approximate justice in an imperfect world. But sometimes a jury trail is also an index to where we are in the great American experiment in race relations. At least, that’s what I was thinking while I spent nine weeks on the southwestern shore of Lake Merrit, serving on the jury of a murder trail in Alameda County Superior Court.

On September 20, 1994, at the West Berkeley Wells Fargo Bank on the corner of University and San Pablo, Keelon Jenkins and Robert McDaniels tried to rob a Brinks truck. In about eleven seconds, a stickup became an open shootout and a homicide. Keelon and Robert were later captured and then tried and convicted in 1997. But the judge mishandled the jury and the verdict was thrown out. After numerous delays the case finally came to retrial.

So it was that I found myself at the County Courthouse from February to April in 2001. So it was that I found myself in a courtroom with others who had been variously voted, appointed, hired, and selected to specially represent us as a people, acting to serve justice for us all after the killing of one of us. And so it was that I found out that “us” presently includes our various races in a range of roles that was, in the end, more heartening than not.

Our twelve jurors and three alternates were: eight whites, three blacks, three Asian Americans and one Hispanic. (Not too bad–from the 2000 Census in Alameda County, statistically perfect representation would have been: 7.35 whites, 2.24 blacks, 3.08 Asian Americans, and 2.33 others, with 2.85 of the total being of Hispanic origin.) We were seven women and eight men from their 20’s to their 60’s, including a martial arts teacher, a U.C. Berkeley professor, a financial analyst, an autoworker, an attorney, a Baptist pastor, an IRS auditor, an insurance executive, a hotel staffer, a school nurse, and retirees.

But the defendants were young black men. None of us were young black anything. So, were we a jury of peers? How much of being a peer depends variously on age, race, class, gender, education, background, and personal choices? If I were the one on trial, would Keelon or Robert have qualified as a peer to me?

I grew up in the same East Oakland neighborhood as Keelon (and nearby Robert), though half a generation earlier. I knew the schools he had gone to and the streets he named. My parents had jobs in the same general range as his parents. But at age 13 he was posting lookout at the corner of 50th and Bancroft. At that age, I was at my church youth group, doing my homework, riding my bike around Mills College, and watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island.” My elementary school classmates had been about as racially mixed as could be. But I remember the acute sense of difference between the standout athletic black kids and the standout academic Asian kids, against a background of the white kids whose families always seemed to be moving away.

50th Ave. x Bancroft

By race and age, the closest peer to Keelon and Robert was not anyone on the jury, but rather the deputy D.A.: the very dark, smooth topped, young, married, very serious, and very hard-working Elgin Lowe, who himself had come out of an inner-city setting. He ran the whole prosecution: the opening and closing arguments, escorting witnesses in and out of the courtroom, conducting the direct and cross examinations, handling evidence, and listening to day after day of tedious defense questioning with enough attention to immediately object to subtle versions of hearsay. He wore an endless succession of really sharp suits and ties. (In our dress-down world, trial attorneys must be the last bastion of reliable customers for the dry cleaning industry. By contrast, we on the jury dressed more and more casually, so that by the third week up to eight of us were showing up in jeans on any given day.) He stood for the jury each time we entered and recessed. He was absolutely professional when the verdicts were finally read: not a trace of emotion on his face, files for his next case at his side. In the courtroom, as the trial began, he was perhaps the closest in background to Keelon and Robert. But now, by virtue of his life choices, he sat exactly opposite them, and a world away.

Indeed, the most striking racial aspect of this trial was the full range of roles filled by African Americans: the D.A., both defendants, and three jurors; the judge (the Honorable Joan Cartwright); her court clerk and court reporter; several of the Alameda County Sheriffs rotating through as bailiffs (such that there were two days during week five when every civil servant in the courtroom was black); all the defendants’ family members and girlfriends; the driver of the Brinks truck (alive but still shaken years later); and one Mr. Jeffrey Spencer of Alameda, who lost his life at age 32 delivering coins and bills for you and me to withdraw. From greatest to least, every level of power in this setting included African Americans.

But there seemed to be relatively little that was identifiably black about the basic tone and conduct of the trial. Major deviations from standard English were treated as exceptional matters. It consumed considerable court time when the phrase “Break yo’self!” came up in testimony, with instant objections from the defense attorneys as to whether one could assume the original hearers knew the meaning. (Apparently, when accompanied with a display of a lethal force, it means: “Hand over everything of value you have right now, starting with your gold chains.”) All this was reduced to transcript in more or less standard English by the court reporter, Francine Kidd. When called upon, she read back testimony aloud in standard American English with a straight midland accent (“He pointed his gun at us and said, ‘Break yourselves’”).

When the traitor girlfriend was testifying, I wondered how I would feel as the D.A., impeaching a witness the same color and shade of skin as my own. I would be sad seeing one of my own behave so shamefully. But I would also be eager, as I think he was, to clearly display and name her lying. There is dignity in being shamed when you are acting shamefully. You too are being taken seriously, expected to rise to a common high standard, and duly chastised when you don’t. Martin Luther King Jr. called us to become a nation where we would be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. We usually take him in the positive sense: that everyone’s positive qualities should be appreciated regardless of race. But the opposite is just as true: everyone’s character failings should be grieved regardless of race.

We usually assume that having more of our own kind in positions of power is automatically good for our own kind. Was that the case here for African Americans? To what extent was the heavy African American presence in this trial a laudable sign of progress, that blacks have indeed accumulated the education and achievements needed to occupy positions of public power and prestige in our society? And to what extent was the heavy African American presence in this trial a co-opting of blacks, using them as proxies of white culture to do the dirty work of condemning their own? Having inherited a legal system from mostly-white, Anglo-American culture, how much shall we be grateful that our courtrooms have stood the test of time as being as fair to all as any, a good gift (however imperfect) of one culture to many? And how much shall we be resentful that one culture’s ways of pursuing justice have largely become the norm for all of us, an imposition of one culture on many? But I ask these questions as an outsider to the Black/White divide. How did it feel for Keelon’s father, faithfully attending the trial, looking on as a black prosecutor and black judge oversaw the final dashing of his hopes for his son?

THE MAIN COUNTY COURTHOUSE–our fifth–is forever marked by race. Built as a W.P.A. project in 1935, its main lobby features two elaborate, gilt mosaics depicting Alameda County in the Spanish and the early American periods. An explorer, a priest, two Native Americans, a ‘49er, settlers planting and harvesting, a pioneer mother and child–this was at least in part the collision of races and civilizations that brought us about. Eventually people from every possible place on earth would come here to stay, and here we are.

The Courthouse is now named after the late René C. Davidson, the first African American to serve as our County Clerk-Recorder, from 1974 to 1992. (Unfortunately, the Clerk-Recorder offices have since moved to an annex building a block away.) With all due respect to Mr. Davidson, I wonder if anyone seriously considered instead naming the Courthouse after Earl Warren, our former District Attorney who went on to become our State Attorney General, then Governor, and then the 14th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Indeed, Warren had been a deputy D.A. from 1920 to 1925, and thus a direct predecessor to Mr. Lowe. Warren served as D.A. from 1925 to 1939, working his last four years here in our present Courthouse when it was brand new.) In 1954 it was the Warren court–with Warren appointed just the year before by President Eisenhower–that ruled unanimously on the landmark 20th-century decision on race, Brown v. Board of Education. “Does segregation of children in the public schools solely on the basis of race…deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunity?…We believe that it does.”

In the decade after Brown, our courthouse became the venue of the dramatic 1968 trial of Huey Newton for the shooting of an Oakland policeman. Outside on the steps of the southern entrance the Black Panthers made a show of force with up to 2,000 demonstrators, leaders in military formation, hair up in big Afros, and shouts of “Black Power!”

And race is never very far away. Kitty corner from the Courthouse is the County Law Library, which was the deportation point for Japanese Americans from Oakland and San Leandro during WW II. To the west is the Oakland Museum, showcasing all of our races in our history, art, and natural setting here. North is the Chambers for the County Board of Supervisors, where I personally saw a tall white man in a suit (Supervisor Scott Haggerty) weep openly over the retirement of a colorfully dressed black woman (Supervisor Mary King). On the opposite corner is the Main Library, which collects actively in sixteen languages. And on the east side of the Courthouse is the now contentious Fire Alarm building, which some dream of turning into a new Native American museum. This is how we live out what it means to all be here, with ancestral roots all over the world, and now all here and trying to get along together.

We heard 43 witnesses, contemplated over 100 items of evidence (including the bloody uniform, the gun and fatal bullet, the bank camera tapes, interview transcripts, and endless pictures). We learned: Who does what in an armored car delivery. Why banks have ATM cameras (to prove you or someone you trusted indeed withdrew the $100 you later forgot about and called to dispute). How a bullet entering the upper arm can tear through the heart and both lungs. How to tell your family you’re leaving town and might not ever see them again. And how the long arm of the law quietly apprehends fugitives catching busses halfway across the continent.

IS A JURY OF LAYPEOPLE a good idea? Going into this trial I was doubtful. But I found that the combined reactions, recollection and reasoning of twelve people, the give and take of reconciling differing opinions to be tremendously powerful. In the end, we did our best to apply the law we’d been given to the facts as we distilled them from the evidence we’d been presented. In the end, we persevered through confusion, persuasion, disagreements, changes of heart and mind, numerous quite surprising turns of debate, lots of learning, and tons of reasoning, and came to unanimous verdicts. The system worked.

The jury trial is peculiar to the Anglo-American world. Continental Europeans generally view jury trials as a more or less a farce, as if “no prior felony convictions” is really an adequate bar to clear as a test of good character and judgment. But it’s the Anglo-American system that opens the door most widely for our various races and backgrounds to participate so very directly in our shared administration of justice. There we were on the jury, a group that included grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African American slaves and Chinese peasants, a descendent from the Mayflower Pilgrims, and a descendent of Abraham and Jacob, all treated as absolute peers and charged together with the task of determining guilt or innocence for a murder. And given our vastly mixed population, how else but with mixed-background juries can we consistently render verdicts that stand the test of legitimacy in the public eye?

We spent our recesses and deliberation time in an old and uncomfortably small room, stepping over each other, using the single-stall bathrooms with poor sound control right in our room, sharing the snacks and newspapers that we’d brought, holding the elevators for each other, chatting about the news, playing cards, working on the daily crossword, making coffee, griping and joking about the proceedings, rooting for the A’s, scouting out lunch spots, chatting about books we’d brought, making small inquiries about each other lives, and, it seemed to me, basically getting along. Here, try my home baked fudge. Here, have another donut. Did you go the game last Saturday, wasn’t it great? Look, from our window you can see what’s left of Montgomery Ward’s. Hey, this morning I saw our judge pull up in a Jaguar.

AND SO, Keelon Jenkins, born in 1973 and in prison since 1995, will mostly likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, guilty of first-degree felony murder. Robert, born a year later and arrested a year earlier, will mostly likely spend the better part of his adult life locked up for aiding and abetting Keelon. Neither Wells Fargo nor Brinks lost any money that day, though Brinks did eventually pay out reward money in five figures. We on the jury each got our $15 per day and (I hope I’m speaking for all of us) the satisfaction of delayed justice finally being served.

And so I’m thankful. But I’m also thankful that here, a tall, white chief bailiff, full of settled dignity, good spirits, and complete attention to his job, happily serves to protect and assist an African American woman judge and her courtroom. I’m thankful that a very mixed-race jury of laypeople can sit together in friendly fashion cheek by jowl day after day for weeks, and then reach unanimous verdicts after three days of serious, principled and heavy debate. And I’m thankful to live in a place where the race of a murder victim can be an absolute non-issue. I’m glad to live here, now, and with all of you.

Next time you get that jury summons, remember: justice for all means justice by all. The great American experiment in race relations could be going better; it surely could be going much worse. But how it goes depends on you and me and what we choose to do together.