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"FacebookPinterest\n\nI did not want to do jury duty. I said a prayer to baby Jesus the night before, asking him to use his baby Jesus powers and to please Lord not let them pick me like they always do. I've been through the jury slog a few times, and the attorneys always pick me. If there are 423 New Yorkers stuffed like pickled herring in a room, the lawyers will scan the crowd and zero in on my jurisprudence. I must have a sign on me that says: \"I'm really good at being judgmental.\"\n\nThe lawyers ask you some questions to find out if you are an assclown or otherwise unsuitable to judge the accused. I thought about saying something prejudicial or just plain bonkers in hopes it might eliminate me\u2014like when they ask me what I think about cops, I'd just mewl like a cat in violent heat. I would be escorted like a JetBlue pilot out of the halls of justice.\n\nBut then I heard the excuses and felt embarrassed for the excuse-makers. The white woman near me clutching her Whole Foods sack claimed she had a boyfriend who was almost successfully mugged fourteen years ago by a black man on the street and (cue voice shake) she can still...remember...that day. She was dismissed. I think we all thought: Faker. More folks begged off, claiming they couldn't do their civic duty because they'd once been mugged, had their bikes and innocence stolen, or had an encounter with an odious cop and couldn't be a fair judge for the rest of their God-given lives. By the time they got to me, I was too ashamed to cough up a lame story.\n\nOf course, I was the first juror picked. That doesn't always mean your case goes to trial, but this time it did. Eventually someone told me I was the foreman. I had no idea what this meant. It sounded like I had been drafted as a metalworker and would soon be laying pipe.\n\nNext thing I know\u2014there was hardly a pause\u2014the trial begins, and I am immersed in the rabbit hole of a curiouser and curiouser case.\n\nJust before Christmas 2010, a 36-year-old black man, Trevell Coleman, walks into a police station in Harlem and tells the cops that something's been troubling him. He was involved in a shooting many years ago, sixteen or seventeen years ago, and has information they might want to hear. At first the cops take his name and number, tell him to go home, we'll look into it, but that was a long time ago. They never call.\n\nHe goes back into the station a few weeks later. It is really eating him. He tells them he was the shooter. He doesn't know if the guy lived or died, and he needs to know. He wants to tell the whole story. He wants to \"make right\" with the victim's family. Incredibly, he waives his Miranda rights, does not ask for a lawyer, and begins to confess.\n\nHe was a teenager, out of work, living in the projects with his grandma. One day he bought a gun from another guy, a .40-caliber semiautomatic, and decided to use it to rob someone. Late, past midnight one night, he jumped on his bike and went scouting the neighborhood. He spotted a light-skinned man smoking underneath the elevated railroad tracks on Park Avenue and 114th Street, and figured he was easy prey. Walked up to the guy, told him to hand over his money. Instead, the man, who had six bucks in his pocket and PCP in his system, grabbed for the gun, and a brief struggle ensued. Trevell Coleman fired three shots. The man winced. Trevell managed to break free and flee on his bike\u2014the guy was still lumbering after him but wilted in the middle of the road\u2014and so Trevell, looking back, wondered: Did I get him? Bad? He would wonder that for seventeen years.\n\nI never knew this until after the trial\u2014the judge must have limited what we were told about the defendant, and I didn't recognize him\u2014but Trevell Coleman, I later learned when I looked into the case, became a semifamous rapper in the years after the crime. He was called G. Dep. Ghetto Dependent. Signed with Sean \"Puffy\" Combs's Bad Boy Records. (You might remember the Harlem Shake dance from his \"Let's Get It\" video.) Later, his career stalled, and he slid into drug use. Got sober. Got married. Had kids. And then years after the cops had stopped asking questions about a 1993 cold case, he turned himself in and \"made right\" with his wrongs.\n\nOnce the D.A. matched him to the crime, we the jurors wrestled with a mess of things, but couldn't avoid the evidence. I sometimes wondered if I was fit to judge this man who was capable of acts of public violence and personal honor I couldn't even imagine having to wrestle with. And I'd think: Hasn't this man suffered enough? He's done twenty years in his head already. That's a slower, more infernal form of justice, the interior kind, isn't it?\n\nAnd yeah, tell that to the guy he killed.\n\nWe found him guilty, because he was, and no one's excusing anything. (After the trial, he talked to MTV and, sounding like a man unburdened, thanked \"everybody that was involved in the case.\") Still, it's a heavy feeling: I helped put him away, and yet when I think of someone who did his duty, I think of Trevell Coleman.\n\nEditor's note: Trevell Coleman will be sentenced on May 8."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/jim-nelson-june-2012-trevell-coleman-trial>