If you've ever taken juries for granted or wished them abolished, it's worth a minute to think about Kazakhstan. For the first time ever, Kazakhstan is holding jury trials.
I didn't know anything about Kazakhstan until I looked it up. It's the largest of the former Soviet republics in central Asia. Russian forms its long northern border, and to the east it borders China. It's huge, the ninth largest country in the world by area.
Kazakhstan's legal system is hardly a showpiece. The State Department calls its human rights record "poor," listing "abuse and mistreatment of detainees and prisoners," "unhealthy prison conditions," and "corruption in law enforcement, the judiciary, and the legal system" among its many problems. But with the help of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, one thing has changed: Kazakhstan's death penalty trials have juries now.
The more things change
How did those first jury trials go? According to the newspaper Caravan, translated in the blog Neweurasia.net, some challenges are the same whether you've had jury trials for two weeks or two hundred years:
About one third of the candidates informed the court that they could not take part in a trial. Some referred to being swamp at work. The teachers of the state university and the schools turned out to be the busiest people. Others said they had to take care of their sick husbands or wives at home, or worried about their chickens and cows left behind. One candidate, as it turned out, did not speak Russian, a language of the trial, another had an impaired hearing. Satybaldy Nurushev, who was worried about leaving his stock room unattended, became the very first juror in the history of the country’s judiciary.
Concern and hope
Neweurasia.net's Kazakhstan author, named Leila, is thoughtful and probably right in anticipating larger problems to come, problems of race and ethnicity:
[F]rom what I read, the selection of a jury does not provide for language, gender and ethnic criteria. In the United States, there was an infamous 1992 Californian trial in the case of Rodney King, where a jury that consisted mostly of white people acquitted the police officers of excessive force on a black man. In Kazakhstan, with the recent worrying events in Malovodnoe and Tengiz, where members of different ethnicities clashed after ordinary arguments, it might become important too.
Nevertheless she is full of a remarkable hope that juries might bring competence, honesty, and trust to her country's justice system:
I really welcome this news. Jury helps people to see what the trial is like and feel they become part of justice. In Kazakhstan, where people tend to mistrust the courts, having a jury might win back their trust. The defense and the prosecution will try to be more participative and prepare well to present their arguments. It would help combat corruption: it is more more difficult to bribe 11 people than one judge.
A moment of majesty
It's easy to laugh at juries. When the Lewis Libby jurors asked about the reasonable doubt standard, the whole Internet seemed to rise up to call them morons. At least twice a week I see the quote attributed to Norm Crosby: "When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty." The renowned trial teacher Herb Stern used to call jurors "undershirted beer suckers," and he had to answer for it in Denver last week.
I'm in the other camp; I'm a little bit of a jury sap. It's a flawed system, because we're flawed people. But every time a room full of potential jurors takes the oath before voir dire, I have to pause at the majesty -- and hope -- of that moment and what it represents. I wish them well in Kazakhstan.
(Photo by Steve Evans at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=9640383&size=m; license details there.)
