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JESUS DRAWS JURY DUTY in the trial of a black man accused
of robbing and killing a young white couple and leaving their
bodies in shallow graves along a deserted country road. The evidence
is largely circumstantial, the defense incompetent, and Jesus
finds his mind wandering during the complicated testimony from
expert witnesses. Nevertheless, he understands the gravity of
the task at hand when the judge tells the jurors that a guilty
verdict for first degree murder will likely result in the death
penalty.
JESUS
and the other jurors would take less than an hour to convict.
Then the whole crew, alternates and all, would get bused over
to Fuddrucker’s, where the politically ambitious prosecutors
would buy platters of cheese sticks, and toast every one of
them as citizen heroes. Late into the night, Jesus would drink
strawberry daiquiris through a straw and do the bump with the
elderly forewoman as Earth Wind and Fire plays on the juke box.
Then, after nine years of costly appeals and a critically-acclaimed
"Frontline" documentary, new DNA evidence would exonerate
the death row inmate, and another man would confess to those
murders, as well as a half-dozen others. When questioned by
a reporter for the local paper, Jesus would point to the eventual
discovery of the real killer as proof that the system works.
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