A birthday ago, I reached the age where, if summoned for jury duty, I can say no. That means that I will end my life having never served on a jury.

That’s okay. I can think of few things less pleasant than hanging out with eleven other fallible people for a week or so, trying to decide thumbs-up or thumbs-down on someone’s life and/or liberty.

I know that serving on a jury is a civic duty, and twice in my life I’ve shown up for jury selection. I would have served if picked, but both times I was excused, because our system allows the prosecution or defense to strike jurors they think might be inclined to put their own judgment above the law.

The system can be manipulated by anyone who knows a modicum of Scripture. If, say, you quote from Jeremiah 17 on your jury questionnaire, and note that “the heart is deceitful in all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it?” neither the prosecution nor the defense will want you in the jury box.

I never had to resort to my early experiences in Baptist Sunday School, which didn’t introduce me to Jeremiah anyway. It did introduce me to Genesis.

Genesis was proof enough that if the accused is human, the accused is damned well guilty, circumstances notwithstanding.

On my jury questionnaires, I noted that I had been a journalist and college professor, which apparently was reason enough for both prosecution and defense to think I might be a loose cannon.

 

My last jury summons was ten years ago. The trial was held in the town of Challis, an hour down the Salmon River from Stanley. It’s the county seat of Custer County, a town of eleven hundred souls in the middle of ranches and mines and tourist-attracting mountains. It had become, like many Idaho communities, a retirement destination for law enforcement, the military, and medical and fire first responders. Its politics were and are conservative.

As far as I know, except for proliferating Trump signs and a lowering water table, things haven’t changed much in ten years. Challis is in a scenic rock-rimmed valley, surrounded by irrigated hay fields. Cottonwoods grow thick along the river. They provide a buffer of green between town and the dusty desert mountains to the north and east. Rents and grocery prices are lower than in Idaho’s cities. You can see why the town attracts people wanting to spend their declining years in peaceful isolation.

The town is isolated but not always peaceful. People get murdered there, not often, but often enough for people to recall the last murder and the murder before that. Poverty exists there, and domestic abuse, and alcoholism, and you can find meth if you need it. But there is a general tolerance for anyone who can show up on time for work and do what they’re being paid to do. Gossip reliably lets the townspeople know who needs forgiveness. Minding one’s own business is regularly invoked as an excuse for inaction, and inaction is equated with minding one’s own business.

The people are hard on each other, and especially hard on the town’s young people, and of the young people, they’re especially hard on the females. It’s not uncommon for a young woman’s plans for college and career to be derailed by pregnancy or trauma. It’s not uncommon for young men to fight each other in the bars, often over women too young for them to be fighting over.

There is a community sense that life is a zero-sum affair. Resources are limited, and they include well-paid jobs, niche positions in the tourist industry, and sexual partners.

Challis is like a lot of other towns where the economy depends on uncontrollable outside forces: pensions and Social Security, the price of metals, beef, real estate, diesel, and money, the weather during tourist season, and lately, whatever new coronavirus is spreading from Pocatello and Idaho Falls. People try to control whatever small parts of their lives they can, usually children or spouses. Sometimes they can’t even control them.

 

Fifty people were in the courtroom with me for jury selection. I had driven down from Stanley that morning on Highway 75. It had been some time since I had been in Challis for anything but gas and new license plates, but I recognized people I had worked with on Forest Service crews forty years before. A young man sitting next to me introduced himself, and I had worked with his grandfather building fences. But most of the people in the room were my age or older.

The prosecutor detailed the crime: three men had given fourteen-year-old girls drugs and alcohol and had penetrative sex with them. Two of the men had negotiated plea bargains and had been sentenced for their crimes. The third, possibly because he was seventeen at the time of the crime, had pled not guilty, and made a trial necessary.

The defendant was sitting in front of us and was heavily medicated or developmentally disabled or the pressure of the trial had caused him to dissociate completely. He was the son of a miner who worked the night shift on the local mine. I don’t think his father was in the courtroom.

The defendant’s court-appointed defense lawyer was beside him. He looked tired, sad, and defeated. The prosecutor was a young woman who radiated competence and a quiet anger, and she gave a graphic account of the charges against the defendant.

It was clear that the prosecutor was familiar with the concept of rape culture, had identified it in the town of Challis, and was determined to eradicate it.

After the charges were presented, the clerk of the court asked any jurors who felt they had good reason not to be on the jury to raise their hands if they wanted to talk to the judge. I raised mine. So did about fifteen other people. Most of them were women.

When I was ushered into the judge’s chambers, I was confronted with the prosecutor and her investigator, the defendant and his lawyer, the clerk of the court, and the judge.

“This sort of thing has been going on in Challis for as long as I can remember,” I told the judge.

“I went to dances here when I was still in high school,” I said. “It was going on then. Sophomores in high school were going out with twenty-eight-year-olds. Charge everybody in the county who’s committed statutory rape, and you’ll have a lot of people checking the statute of limitations.

“Now you’ve got someone who doesn’t understand how much trouble he’s in because he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, and you’re going to make a scapegoat of him.

“I don’t think he should be on trial,” I said. “This town should be on trial.”

There was silence. The judge asked me if I had anything more to say.

“Only that if I was the defendant’s lawyer,” I said, “I’d find out who didn’t get charged.”

 

When the list of jurors was announced, my name wasn’t on it. I filled out a form for mileage reimbursement and a couple of weeks later I received a check for fifteen dollars. I heard much later that the mostly geriatric jury had returned a verdict of guilty, and the defendant would be sentenced after a pre-sentence investigation. Whatever mitigating factors might be discovered, I thought, Custer County had spent many tax dollars on the trial, and for that reason alone would not be inclined toward lenience.

All in all, it was a sordid and sorry event and I hoped that I had said enough to the court to render myself unfit for a jury summons ever again.

The prosecutor left Custer County for a North Idaho law firm when her term was up. There were unverifiable rumors that she had conflicts with Custer County officials over her tendency to exceed her budget.

I don’t imagine being a small-town prosecutor is a soul-satisfying job anyway. I’m not sure being any kind of lawyer gets you a brass-band welcome at the gates of Heaven.

In the ensuing years, I’ve noticed that property crimes are rigidly prosecuted in Custer County. Crimes against persons are not as often brought to trial, although I suspect that they are as common. I suppose that you either stole something or you didn’t, while if you damaged or took someone’s life, you could question the extent of the damage or say that the person you murdered deserved it.

Of course, a prosecutor, citing the impending repeal of Roe v. Wade, with its implicit assertion that the state owns women’s bodies, could argue that statutory rape is a property crime akin to poaching.

 

I really do believe that John Calvin was right about humans being totally depraved ever since Eve took the apple from the serpent’s mouth. If that is true, Challis is a town like any other, full of people trying to be good, but failing utterly because of their deceitful, sick, incomprehensible hearts.

In every town there is a public discourse that praises law and order, virtuous behavior, piety and grace. In every town there is another, darker life beneath the surface, one dominated by lust, gossip, avarice, pleasure in the misfortunes of others, and a slow, lazy, reptilian self-righteousness that tolerates human frailty for the simple reason that it feeds on it.

I also believe—against my will—that there is a need for lawyers, judges, and juries because I also believe in the rule of law (although I often say I look forward to someday living in a country where it applies).

But the rule of law, however imperfectly administered, is preferable to the rule of our deceitful hearts. The courts are fallible institutions, and their actions are sometimes comparable to performing surgery with a meat axe, but in so many human transactions they’re the last line of defense against a life of tribe versus tribe, strong versus the weak, the rulers versus the ruled.

 

Julie and I let our subscription to The Challis Messenger lapse this year. It was and is the newspaper of record for Custer County. It’s been publishing since 1881, but it has been sold to an out-of-town syndicate and has been getting thinner and thinner as advertisers have melted away. Also, the new editor has replaced at least one literate and perceptive reporter with people who were less so. Journalist positions are going unfilled. Crime reporting has dwindled, even though there are crimes still being committed. Finally, the most popular part of the paper, the list of news items culled from issues twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, and a hundred years ago, was dropped because no one volunteered to work on it.

It doesn’t look as if the paper will last the year, after having survived depressions, two world wars, and the current decline of empire. It will be a loss, as it has been a moral center, of sorts, for the town, one that shined a light at least a little below the surface.

Here in Sawtooth Valley, we still hear rumors and rumors of rumors from Challis. Every four years, a retired cop or military policeman will run against the county sheriff in the Republican primary, promising to clean up the county and jail all the meth dealers, murderers, jaywalkers, juvenile delinquents, homeless cattle thieves, and people from Stanley having too much fun. These challengers have all been defeated by the incumbent, who believes in low-key law enforcement and—logically, in a county almost as big as Connecticut—focuses on crime prevention rather than catching criminals. Most of us—especially those of us who vote in Stanley—prefer that approach to expensive big-city police tactics and cowboy-hatted authoritarianism, at least until the whole town of Challis gets charged with aiding and abetting statutory rape.

Since the 1970s, people in Challis have accused the people in Stanley of moral libertinism. Specifically, Stanley residents, visiting Challis for work or courthouse business, get whispered questions whether it’s true that Stanley is the location of key parties, where everybody’s car keys are put in a hat and wives are swapped according to which husband draws which set of keys. It’s designed as a celebration of gender roles, if nothing else.

As far as I know, nobody in Stanley has ever held a key party, and those of us who live further up the valley wouldn’t be invited if they did. But the story has persisted for a long time. It’s giving somebody, or a bunch of somebodies, some heavy psychic satisfaction, and that’s a creepy enough thought to make Julie and me a little nervous when we head downriver for new license plates. We’ve crossed Challis off our list of retirement communities, despite the beauty of its setting, and the fact that it’s full of people right out of the Bible.