The Best Justice Available

and the Best Truth Available

I served on a jury this week, for the first time in my life.

You might think that I, a person obsessed with jury-based adjudication, would have done this before but no.

I wanted to record the experience while it was still fresh.

What can I say?

It was dramatic. It was harrowing. It was a criminal trial! A man’s freedom hung in the balance! It had consequences on a… municipal level. Okay, so maybe not that dramatic or harrowing. It did involve precious metals, though. Specifically, $944 of dirty brass. Also, there were some questions about an unauthorized and unmetered connection to a water line.

I knew I was in the jury pool a few months ago. I was told on the phone that I wouldn’t have to go in as my wife is pregnant. While I appear to spend all of my time on here, I’m generally quite busy so not having to go in was welcome news. Then on Monday, I got a reminder to report to jury duty on Tuesday morning. Looks like it wasn’t canceled, after all. I figured no big deal, my wife is eight months pregnant now so they will definitely let me leave.

“I’ll probably even make all of my afternoon meetings!” I told myself.

Turns out that only about twenty people showed up for selection. I think most of the other candidates read between the lines and just didn’t show up if it was going to be significantly inconvenient. My guess is the same was expected of me, but little did they know I am a rule-follower. Of those twenty candidates, four of them had plane tickets taking them out of state the following day, two were disabled, and I did that dumb thing where I opened my big mouth. My big, dumb, stupid mouth.

When the state prosecutor asked, “Would you have trouble convicting primarily on testimony?” I raised my hand and said, “Yes, if there was evidence referenced in the testimony that could be reasonably brought to court and was not, I would have difficulty convicting.”

Hey, I was safe. I could give my honesty answer. My wife is eight months pregnant. No way they were putting me on that jury.

I think the defense fought to keep me after that.

There I was, juror number twelve.

While this was for sure annoying for a few minutes, I do also look at it as the honored civic duty that it is. As soon as I walked into that jury box, the reality sunk in. “Oh, I really need to pay attention to this.” This was a criminal case. If I voted to convict, this guy could go to jail.

The judge spoke with me briefly, as well as the bailiff, and we got it arranged so my wife could call the court office if she went into labor. This is a real thing that actually happened. My wife was… not happy.

That done, we got right into hearing opening arguments and witness testimony. Over several witnesses, here’s the story.

A guy gets a job working for “The Water District” in his town, which is basically the local water utility company. His title is “Water Operator.” The town is very small. He’s the only guy who does the day to day operations. If there’s a leak anywhere, you’re calling him and he’s coming out to take care of it. There’s no back-up at all.

However, he has three bosses, all elected officials. They provide some level of oversight and have monthly meetings but the Water Operator doesn’t go for the most part. Only one of them ever really manages him during his work there. More importantly, nobody ever writes down any policies. There are state procedures off “somewhere” but nobody can reference or point to them specifically or say where they’re at. Stuff gets done “because it’s always been done that way.”

At some point, the Water District puts a truck up for sale on surplus and the Water Operator buys it. He still uses it to do his job as the Water Operator. At some point, there’s a project to replace six or seven hundred brass water meters. This takes a while, but he does it. He recycles the meters and gives the money to the county… kind of? This was where testimony became unclear. Nobody could say definitively how many water meters were recycled at what time, or where. There was a large bulk of water meters, which he recycled at some point. However, not all of them were recycled. Maybe a small amount, maybe most, nobody can say.

Years go by. Then the thing happens that always happens. People got comfortable.

The Water Operator is a guy that has his fingers in a lot of pies. “Diversifying his sources of revenue” you could say. He does scrap metal reclamation on the side. Other construction work. He starts to keep some of his scrap metal at the shop for the Water District. It’s a big shop, and that’s a perk of the gig. His boss never says anything to him about this for several years. He keeps a camping trailer and a travel trailer on site. He even lives at the shop for a few days while some work was being done on his driveway. Nobody is a stickler for the rules. Hell, the Water Operator is using his own tools to get work done, which nobody disputes. The boundaries are messy. Sometimes, he goes to his own house to pull something personal out of his own shop to get something done. Nobody cares.

His house happens to be at the end of a main water line so he sets up a sampling station in his own backyard.

Hey, he’s the Water Operator! He can do that kind of thing. He’s the person who sets up monitoring stations. His house is at the end of a line so it even makes a kind of sense. Eventually, the big projects are all completed and he really only needs to do small stuff like mow the lawns around water towers and the like. It’s a comfortable, civic existence. He’s open about the work slowing down. He even asks if he can go part time.

Relationships with management are good. He has the occasional lunch with his boss. The three directors have monthly meetings and he mostly doesn’t attend. Other than for a receptionist working in a front office he talks to occasionally, he’s basically left alone.

Then COVID happens.

The Water Operator doesn’t want to get the shot. People get political. His bosses get pissed.

They tell him to move his desk out into the shop yard. He’s no longer allowed into the office. His primary boss stops coming around the shop for months. The Water Operator says he understands this given the way the world was thinking at the time.

One of his other bosses, one who is almost never directly involved in the day to day, tells him to clean up the shop. No other instructions. Get rid of all the junk. He takes all the garbage to the dump. He takes his own scrap metal and the Water District’s scrap metal the recycling plant. Some of those brass water meters are still hanging around and get recycled along with his own stuff. He gets one check from the recycling company and keeps it.

The check he gets from the recycling company is over $3,000. Nobody disputes he owns at least some of this metal. Specifically, the Water District believes that $944 of dirty brass was their money. The prosecution put forward that argument anyway, and didn’t dispute the other $2,000 or so dollars was the rightful property of the Water Operator. I wouldn’t be surprised if the truth was different.

Nobody thinks anything about this for several months.

Nobody in management ever told him that he needed to give them the money. This is where things get confused from the Water Operator’s perspective. This isn’t like the truck, where it was one large item with a high value. Or the previous recycling journey where it was a bunch of little items of large value that all belonged to the Water District. This was a mixed transaction, long after the inventory had become muddled. The Water District has no policy on how this is to be handled, or at least not one that they are willing to put into evidence. There’s no inventory that can be referenced. This doesn’t happen a lot. The Water District witnesses say it’s called out in their employee handbook, but again this is not submitted into evidence.

Recall what I said with my big fat mouth. “If there is evidence mentioned in testimony that could have reasonably been brought into evidence, but isn’t, then I would have a hard time convicting.”

When questioned on the stand, neither commissioner could even say what the current recycling or surplus policy is, even after this all happened. Even after an auditor told them to create one! They stated it existed, that that there were other state level policies as well, although not in evidence. They knew it was there. They just couldn’t say what was in it.

Then, the charge of the unauthorized sampling station. Several months after he leaves the Water District, the Water Operator is surprised to find the new contractor testing for leaks outside of his house. They’ve found the sampling station! They’ve dug it up and proved that when they run water through he pipe stand in his yard that the meter doesn’t turn! The sheriff is called and video evidence is taken.

The Water Operator agrees that this is his fault and he should have removed it after he left the district. He says he never uses it but would be happy to pay for whatever water the district believes he might have used. They refuse. Instead, they move to press criminal charges that we the jury are now hearing.

The Water Operator says he told his boss about this and it was okay’ed. He thinks his boss forgot. He says he even published the results to use in official documents with his location listed! All of this gets rolled up into a big report given to the Department of Health.

The boss insists this would never happens and would have had to be approved by the Department of Health, and that all their monitoring sites are listed with that agency. The current Water Operator for the district sides with the boss and says in twenty-eight years he’s never seen a connection made in that manner. This did sound very reasonable to me. My guess is that this is a really big taboo practice and you’re absolutely not supposed to do it. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that the Water Operator was trying to save himself some small amount of money, gave himself an unauthorized and unmetered water connection, and used it for sampling but also did some stuff for personal use.

But again, the list of approved monitoring sites is not submitted into evidence. They must have this because it is shared with the Department of Health. So why is it not given to us? We, the jurors, have absolutely no evidence regarding what the authorized monitoring sites were from the Department of Health and this seems like an easy enough thing to obtain. Why are we trying to determine if an officially published fact is true based on testimony without the corresponding documentation?

Without intending it, both the prosecution and the defense gave reasonable doubt as to the status of the monitoring station. Both said that the Water Operator’s house was a good place to begin testing because it was at the end of the line.

The defense tried to put forward a pretty obnoxious theory that the Water District was out to get their former employee and pretended to be testing as a pretense. The state rebutted this by saying that the Water Operator’s house was a logical place to start looking for leaks because it was at the end of the line. The Water Operator used the same argument for why he built a sampling station there, so it’s not unreasonable that it could legitimately serve that purpose!

We watched security videos of the Water Operator doing the recycling. We had his receipt. We had pictures of the unauthorized connection. There were references made to an audit report. Numerous people took the stand, given the fact-pattern mentioned above.

When myself and the other jurors began deliberations we all looked at each other and said some version of, “did anyone else want to offer to write a check to end all of this when you heard what the disputed amount was?” I mean, Christ. Probably over a hundred thousand dollars of county resources were burned up on this thing.

We talked through the specific charges point by point. We all took it very seriously. That’s the thing I took note of the most. Everyone paid close attention. We had all noted more or less the same facts. Common people, with things to do! None of us wanted to be there! But the seriousness of the matter had brought out the best in everyone. All of us really focused because this was a man’s freedom, potentially. Or at least a persistent criminal record.

We agreed it was reasonable that the Water Operator should have given the county the money from the scrap recycling. But this wasn’t a civil trial. This wasn’t a trial for damages. In such a trial, it had been explained, we could use the preponderance of the evidence, where what seemed “most likely to be true” could be used as the basis for making a decision. This was a trial to determine if he had knowingly stolen the property. Our standard was, “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The criminal statute spoke to state of mind. If there was a policy he had violated, or a section of his handbook, it was on the state to provide such a policy or handbook. Everyone agreed he had not been given direction on how to dispose of items, only to get rid of them. It was reasonable he should have turned the money back over to the district but not to the burden of proof demanded by the charge. There was no such document in evidence. We did not find it beyond a reasonable doubt that he would remember the specifics of the recycling policy from several years previous. Or that management was without fault given the mixing of inventory or lack of oversight.

There were one or two people who wanted to go through a few more arguments in favor of guilt but this concluded pretty early on. Not guilty.

Same thing for the unauthorized water connection. Yeah, I bet he did some revenge watering of his yard. My “vibe” was that he probably looked at some of this stuff like a perk of being his job and he blurred the lines to his advantage. In a civil trial I would say give him a reasonable estimate of the bill for the estimated usage that he should have to pay it back to the Water District. Then he should pay for the work to have it disconnected and maybe a fine. Let that be a lesson to him to not blend official and personal business. In a criminal trial? Pardon my French, you need to show me the fucking document. Show me where it says on paper where all of your sampling stations are set up and that none of them are his house. The prosecution could have done this because this is a published document shared across departments, but did not.

As the trial continued it seemed like this whole thing got caught in the gears of state procedures and an acrimonious personal relationship. The auditors focused in the fact that scrap metal had been recycled and money had not been accounted for appropriately. His boss was too angry to tone it down and so when auditors found it they “followed the process” and since nobody in the audit office has to worry about the prosecution budget they didn’t care about burning six figures of county resources to bring it to trial. His boss also hated him by that point and was eager to see him get nailed for something. That guy stayed for the whole trial even after he had testified. This was personal to him. If it was a matter of money, he would have gotten what he wanted!

Why were the charges criminal? My guess is because that’s where procedures with the state demanded the charges go. The sheriff did testify that his boss kept trying to give other information that could be used to bring charges. But we didn’t see any of that in evidence. It was very clear there was no love lost.

I left out a whole municipal political intrigue subplot. It wasn’t that exciting, though. After he got fired, the Water Operator decided to run for a position as a commissioner for the Water District. The other commissioners put up a list of the allegations on the Water Distric’s website during the election. They were pissed and nobody felt they’d done anything wrong. There was no evidence about who saw it, but my guess is not that many people.

We deliberated for an hour and a half before returning a Not Guilty verdict on all charges. The guy cried, although not a lot. This had been going on for two years and my guess is he probably spent twenty or thirty thousand dollars on attorney’s fees. The process had already punished him well beyond the infraction.

What do I think about all of this from the system level point of view? I think this is the best justice available to mankind. There’s some ultimate justice, where an arbiter who knows everything and every implication can make decisions without error. But humans don’t have access to that kind of justice, or at least not while living. The best you can hope for is that some randomly selected people, who have nothing at all to do with your dispute, will pay close attention, understand the rules, and think carefully on your behalf. Your angry boss doesn’t get to decide. The judge doesn’t get to decide. Random people, like you, get to determine if you behaved reasonably. And that day, in the deliberation room, as I laid out all the documentation that was mentioned in testimony but not provided, or even referenced in appropriate ways, the rest of the jury agreed with me to find the defendant Not Guilty on all counts. We were directed to make our decision based both on the evidence given and the lack of evidence given. If someone wanted this guy to go up the river, they could have scanned some documents into evidence.

This is the imperfect business of being a human being on this planet. It made me feel a lot better about my proposed system for a reputation based news service. When things really matter, people get serious. They bring forward their best. The ceremony of it all asks you to really focus and think. Everyone understands there are implications beyond the present moment. When you’re weighing the years of someone’s freedom or good name, people slow down and get very considerate.

I know everyone is all doom and gloom on the country, and there are problems don’t get me wrong. But this system of justice that we have, is pretty good when all the pieces are moved in the right order. People are really good once you remove all these weird selective filters that get weirdos to congregate together. Brought forward in the right manner, good decisions can get made.

I am proud to be an American, as the song goes.