Thursday’s guilty verdict against Donald Trump on 34 felony counts has raised concerns about a possible effect on democracy in the future: Will prosecutors aligned with one party now feel emboldened to indict elected leaders of another party? The performance of the jury in the Trump trial offers a calming insight.
Mr. Trump, who plans to appeal the verdict, and his supporters had claimed that he could not obtain a fair trial in New York because it is overwhelmingly liberal. The public actually knows little about the individual jurors. They were vetted by both sides during jury selection and asked whether they could weigh evidence dispassionately, particularly in a case involving such a well-known figure.
A few hours into their deliberations, the jurors returned with three requests. They wanted headphones to better review recorded testimony. They asked for a rereading of transcripts of witness accounts of pivotal events. Their concern for factual accuracy was matched by a third, more revealing request.
New York state law does not allow judges to hand out the instructions they give juries for rendering verdicts. That guidance must be read from the bench. Judge Juan Merchan’s ran 55 pages. The jurors returned to hear again a specific passage. It read, “In deciding whether to draw an inference, you must look at and consider all the facts in the light of reason, common sense, and experience.”
Reason, notes Andrew Walker, an ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, ties self-government to conscience and reconciliation. It rests on evidence, and favors listening and empathy over emotion and instinct. “To reason deeply,” he wrote in an essay for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, “must mean there is an honest airing of differences and an honest willingness to hear the other’s side.”
An innate capacity for ordinary citizens to subordinate their own views to reason and place justice ahead of personal preference may be why a right to trial by jury was one of the few points that drew universal agreement in America’s founding constitutional debates. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts summarized that consensus in observing that “the jury is adapted to the investigation of truth beyond any other system the world can produce.”
Fifty-three “free” or “partly free” countries have indicted past or present heads of state since 2000, according to a survey last year by Foreign Policy magazine. One common lesson is that countries with strong democratic institutions often emerge even stronger through those prosecutions. The exercise of equality before the law deepens civic trust.
In the first criminal trial of a former American president, 12 fairly selected jurors followed the facts and the law. In times of high political passion, they showed temperance of reason in the pursuit of truth. Democracy relies on the wisdom and impartiality of such everyday folks.