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Jury Duty: Theatre You Cannot Leave

The envelope looks like a bill and behaves like a warrant. It arrives in the plain mail between a seed catalog and a credit offer, your name printed the way only a government database can print it, and inside is a summons: report to the courthouse on a Monday in March, at half past eight in the morning, prepared to stay. You did not audition for this production. You signed no contract, negotiated no fee, read no script. The paper tells you what happens if you ignore it, and what happens is contempt: a fine, a cell, or both. Of all the performances running in America, this is the only one that conscripts its audience. By the end of the week you may be deciding whether a stranger loses liberty, money, children, or, in the courtrooms that still ask the question, life. The republic keeps one room in which that decision belongs to twelve people who did not volunteer that morning, and every seat in that room is filled by force of law.

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No One Dies Lying

On the twenty-second of May, 1929, at Fort Riley, Kansas, a woman named Zenana Shepard sent her nurse to a closet for a bottle of bootleg whiskey. She said the liquor had a strange smell and a strange taste, and she asked whether enough remained in the bottle to test it for poison. Then she said the sentence that would outlive her by four years and travel all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States: “Dr. Shepard has poisoned me.” The doctor was her husband, Charles A. Shepard, a major in the Army medical corps, and the government would later argue he had salted that whiskey with bichloride of mercury because he loved a woman named Grace Brandon and his wife declined to divorce him. Zenana Shepard died on the fifteenth of June. Her husband was convicted of her murder, and her sentence, the spoken one, did much of the convicting.

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