Special Collection Idea

For my particular text, I would put it in a special collection that focuses on “courtroom narratives and fiction” (while keeping the two categories separate within). While courtroom trials have been prime fodder for numerous books, movies, television shows, and many other forms of media (Twelve Angry Men, A Man for All Seasons, and To Kill A Mockingbird, just to name a few), and many trials have become media sensations, there are much less accounts or narratives of the experiences people have felt serving on a jury. Personal stories about ordinary people’s lived experience on how they felt deliberating in a jury room and experiencing the trial are rare, and my initial investigation yielded next to no nonfiction accounts of such events. Courtroom dramas, if they are based on cases from real life, and even most nonfiction accounts of cases often focus on dramatizing the trial aspect specifically or the result of the deliberations, and they primarily focus on the lawyers, victims, or defendants in the story rather than the jurors.   

Thus, I would aim to start a collection that would set out to discover and solicit any personal experiences of people serving on juries. Since personal narratives and accounts of jury experiences are rare, the collection would still include fictional court dramas and documentary accounts, since they have been a popular topic throughout much of history (going as far back to speeches from Cicero, and even longer) that shape public perceptions of criminal justice. However, the primary focus of this collection would be on real juror accounts so as to gain a fuller understanding of how average people experience the criminal justice system as jurors, since having a trial by jury plays a foundational role in the U.S. legal system. This collection would conceivably be one of the first of its kind, though the task would be somewhat difficult to find enough examples for to balance with the fictional accounts. Still, I have hope that such a collection would be able to provide a better understanding for how juries in our criminal justice system affect average people and how those experiences demonstrate the principles in tension with this process.