Judgment Days.(personal account: serving on a grand jury in New York City)(Brief Article)

America is a land of amateur lawyers, entertained by sensational investigations, from O.J. to JonBenet, and by televised legal mummers, from Judge Judy to Greta Van Susteren. But of all the jurisdictions in the United States, the County of New York, or Manhattan, has the most legally sophisticated citizens, because of the judicial system's insatiable appetite for jurors. New Yorkers hurt and defraud one another in huge numbers, the police haul in seines of perps, and the defendants must be tried. The result is that anyone with a public existence-a voter, a taxpayer, a driver-comes to the attention of the system and gets called for jury duty.

In 24 years of living in Manhattan I have been called for regular jury service four times. I assumed that my place of employment would disqualify me easily-what defense lawyer would want a law-and-order pundit judging his client? But New York lawyers cannot afford to slice it so fine. They must save their challenges for potential jurors who are even more grossly inclined to bias-relatives of cops, of criminals, or of crime victims (I remember one woman who announced in the voir dire that she had both a brother who was a cop and a brother who had been recently murdered). Every time I have been called to serve, I have been picked for a jury. This month I hit the jackpot: grand-jury duty. For four weeks, five days a week, I spent half a day at the hub of the city's legal system. New York's court buildings march north from Foley Square. They are imposing structures, neoclassical or style moderne, with murals of the Founders and Hammurabi, or hortatory slogans about the importance of justice on their walls and lintels. The grand-jury room had a more modest dignity. The 23 grand jurors sat in raked, curved rows, too small for the U.N., more suited to the Congress of Vienna.

The line that everyone knows about grand juries is that a district attorney can get one to indict a ham sandwich. Before my service began, I researched the Anglo-Norman history of the institution, hoping to find more extensive powers. Once in harness, perhaps we could investigate black helicopters, or whether Vince Foster would be alive today if only he'd had a gun. In the event we whinnied and shied a few times, but mostly ran our prescribed course, alongside the attorneys, the police, the victims, and the criminals. In the legal system everyone is a traditionalist.

We heard of deadly weapons and dangerous instruments-boxcutters, crowbars, chairs, cars. We heard of sharpies running scams for many thousands of dollars and bums swiping stuff off the shelves of stores. We heard monosyllabic Morse code testimony-a short grunt means yes, a long grunt means no-and the elaborate monologues of giddy guest stars. We saw squirted crocodile tears and souls so sad they could barely speak.

Most striking was the lingo. Even as there is a form of Japanese used only to address the emperor, ...