Trial Diary: A Journalist Sits on a Baltimore Jury

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Alec MacGillis
@AlecMacGillis
Recently, I was seated as foreman on a jury for an attempted murder case in Baltimore. The victim was an actor on "The Wire" and "We Own This City," the new series on police corruption airing during the trial.
It was an eye-opening experience. My account:

propublica.org
Trial Diary: A Journalist Sits on a Baltimore Jury
Could 12 strangers agree on justice in Baltimore, a city riddled with killings and distrust of the police, in a shooting case where the victim was an actor on the legendary drama “The Wire”?
4:10 AM · Jun 1, 2022

https://www.propublica.org/article/shooting-baltimore-court-wire-trial-diary

By the end of our first afternoon of deliberations in the jury room up the narrow stairs from the courtroom, the water cooler was running low, the lock on the bathroom door kept sticking and the wheezing HVAC system was making it even harder to make out the audio in a crucial jailhouse phone recording. We were also nowhere close to a consensus on whether or not Domonic White was guilty of attempted murder and lesser charges in the 2021 shooting of Chris Clanton in the presence of Clanton’s 5-year-old son.

It was hardly unusual for a jury to struggle to come to an agreement. What made this case unusual was the context provided by the victim’s identity. Clanton was an actor on “The Wire” and is now appearing on “We Own This City,” the new HBO miniseries produced by the creators of “The Wire” and based on Baltimore journalist Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book about an eye-popping police corruption scandal exposed five years ago.

At the heart of the new series, which began airing one week before the trial, was the profound damage that police corruption had done to community trust in law enforcement. “Now, even if you find the witnesses and have a case,” says one cop in the second episode, “now when you need to get 12 people together to make a jury, 12 people to believe that you aren’t lying on the witness stand about who shot Tater or who robbed the Rite Aid, they look at you and remember when some other cop lied on them about their son or brother. The lawyers will tell you that you lost the city juries on that stuff.”

We were now those 12 people, charged with assessing testimony by members of that same Police Department to decide who had shot an actor from the television show that was dramatizing this corruption.

*snip*