TO-WIT: AN UPCHUCK OF JURORS
Quietly I joined him at counsel’s table but he didn’t seem to notice. The jury had already been discharged with the thanks of the court and had filed out. What few spectators there were had cycled on to the next courtroom hoping for a rape or a murder. He remained motionless in his seat, the almost imperceptible table-ward sinking of his head the only clue to his despair.
He was a former law student of mine and this had been his first jury trial. I had offered my help, but he was ambitious and eager to master his craft and had politely declined. As I eased myself into the seat next to him he acknowledged my presence with a sallow smile.
“I couldn’t have put on a better case,” he said. “I’m going to talk to the jurors, there still must be an assemblage of them out there in the hall.”
“Upchuck,” I said.
“Maybe later,” he replied, “first I need to talk to the jurors.”
“No,” I said, “not ‘assemblage,’ ‘upchuck.’ Like a pride of lions or a gaggle of geese, its an upchuck of jurors. That’s the correct word for it. And don’t ever talk to them post mortem, it only makes it worse.”
“I had every detail covered,” he moaned, shaking his head. “I even bought my client a new suit for trial so he would look distinguished and presentable. I am going to talk to them,” he said, and with that he headed out the courtroom door.
He knew nothing yet of Schtunk’s Constant, but he was about to find out. Those of you who try cases are no doubt intimately familiar with the groundbreaking work of that great Russian psychophysicist Yura Schtunk who demonstrated in 1927 that every juror added to an upchuck reduces its mean IQ by an exact and constant factor of .33176. When he did the math, he found that a typical upchuck has a collective IQ less than that of a hamster.
I learned about Schtunk’s Constant the hard way almost forty years ago when I was defending a businessman from a plaintiff who claimed he had timely notified my client of the exercise of an option to purchase his real estate at a very advantageous price. The fact that there was no evidence he had timely exercised the option did not prevent the jury from finding for him anyway.
“Your file was very thick,” a juror told me post mortem. “Somewhere in there you had to have a notice.”
You see, it isn’t the sorting out of the real facts that throws an upchuck into Never Neverland, no. Rather it’s their tendency to fix upon the extraneous stuff, the non-facts, that, just like the hamster’s wheel, provides them with much to do but precious little to show for their efforts.
He was back in less than ten minutes, looking even greener than when he had left. “They told me they found for the defendant because…,” and here he paused for a moment as if to try one more time to swallow the disbelief irretrievably lodged in his throat, “…because my client was dressed so nicely it just didn’t seem like he needed any more money.”
“An upchuck,” he said, nodding sagaciously. “An upchuck,” I said, nodding back.
“No,” he replied, “its really an upchuck. I’m going to be sick.” And with that he gagged once, bolted for the door and was gone.
© 2009, S. Sponte, Esq.