Democratic Acts: Theatre of Public Trials

Winner, Lucy.
Theatre Topics, Volume 15, Number 2, September 2005, pp. 149-169 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tt/summary/v015/15.2winner.html

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Democratic Acts: Theatre of Public Trials

Lucy Winner
This essay began as a story about a class on the theatre of the law. But the story I tell here is about more than that class. It is also about pedagogy outside the classroom, how my subject matter found its way into my lived experience, and how my experience transformed my worldview. What began as an academic projectan investigation of the intersection of theatre, ritual, and trial became for me increasingly personal and political. At a time of a great crisis in American democracy, this experience, rooted in a theatre class, urged me to redefine my notion of civic responsibility and led me to recognize multiple ways democracy is performed.

*************************** In the fall of 2000, I asked my friend Jessie Allen if she would like to teach a class with me. 1 When we were both actors, Jessies penchant for performed intellectual discourse had balanced my desire for a theatre of enchantment. Now Jessie is a lawyer. Together we decided to look at law, particularly public trials, as theatre, merging our professional and academic expertise. We would use the tools of dramatic, performance, and legal theory to analyze how the law functions in our society. This was not a traditional class, but a small, interdisciplinary group study at Empire State College, the State University of New Yorks alternative college for adult students. The group was open to any student who could handle advanced critical material and work independently. Some were midcareer performing artists exploring the boundaries of their art forms. Others were in the social sciences or prelaw. None had a background in performance theory. As the class was getting underway, I was called to jury duty. A conflict emerged; having come of age in the 60s with an ingrained mistrust of the legal system, I resisted the notion of enacting what we were teaching about. I felt complicit working within what I believed to be an often unjust system of justice. But, ultimately, this confluence of theory, pedagogy, and personal experience my active engagement with the workings and misworkings of the justice systemled me to recognize the theatre, the streets, and the courtroom as potential stages for enacting democracy, even as each is also sometimes a platform for grotesque enactments of autocracy. These stages pointed me to the central discovery of this project: the importance of enactment to the theory and ideals of democratic structure, andeven when our experience in daily life falls short of democracythe value of continuing to perform the rituals of democracy, act out its dramas on the stage, in the courtroom, and in the streets, in order to maintain and expand what democracy we have.

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150 Lucy Winner In light of this experience I consider here the following questions: What do the implied intersections among law, ritual, and theatre tell us about the civic functions of performance? What happens when we look at public, performed trialsa part of our civic structureas theatre? What are the performative aspects of these trials that allow spectators various ways into them, and give these performances such weight? And how might an understanding of these help us to perform more actively and effectively as citizens? I will use the tools of dramatic analysis and elements of performance theory to analyze the trial as performance and the courtroom as a stage, and in this way illuminate the potential democratic impulse in both theatre and jurisprudence. I offer three perspectives onto this stage, two stemming directly from the work of the class and the third from my own experience as participant/observer: Class Action I, in the classroom, examines some of the readings the class undertook, in order to provide certain theoretical arguments about the correspondences between theatre, ritual, and law, and to make a case for understanding the performance of public trials as ritual and theatre. Class Action II moves, as the students did, to observation and fieldwork, and investigates two contemporary case studies: the Amadou Diallo case and the Fairness Hearing of the Holocaust Victim Assets Class Action Suit. In Class Action III, I reflect on my concurrent lived experience as a potential juror, evidencing my desire for the means of performing citizenship and connecting my personal longing for participation to the central theme of performing democracy. All of these are interrelated in that the insights gained in each experience are grounded, fundamentally, in contexts of learning: the first, a somewhat traditional, text-based approach to a nontraditional study; the second, the experiential learning of teacher and student; the third, my own personal experience, engaged in what performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood calls the nourishing ground of participatory experience (Performance Studies 153). 2 Finally, in the epilogue, I revisit my initial question about active civic engagement, contextualized by an expanded understanding of performing democracy and informed by this pedagogical journey.

Class Action I: The Search for Evidence In order to look at the range of enactments as part of democratic process, we organized the class to interrelate such widely divergent areas as dramatic and performance theory, jurisprudence, anthropology, legal theory, plays about trials, and popular representations such as Court TV and L.A. Law. We began by examining the correspondences between ritual, theatre, and law, first looking at how a trial functions as a public ritual. Like rituals, trials are potentially transformative. Obviously, the verdict can impose life-altering changes on the direct participants. Both ritual (magical) and legal practices make use of what J. L. Austin called the performative force of language so that, as Jessie notes in her work on Legal Magic, when judges and sorcerers speak in the proper ritual contexts, saying it does make it so(9). Classical anthropological definitions of ritual are useful: Arnold van Genneps theory of the three stages

Democratic Acts 151 of rites of passageseparation, transition, and reincorporationthat mark life crises; and Victor Turners reconfiguration of these in his theory of social drama into four stagesbreach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. In particular, Turners concept of the liminal applies: The performance of public, criminal proceedings responds to a breach of social norms (crime) by taking redressive action in a setting and form that is separated from the world of daily life. Defendants are in a kind of liminal state during a trial, suspended between guilty and not-guilty, free and incarcerated. Sometimes other participantsa sequestered jury, for exampleare also in a liminal state. Additionally, we considered how trials, like rituals, function as a way for the public to confront chaotic, painful, and contradictory social issues. As anthropologist and performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood notes, rituals restor[e], replenish[] and remak[e] belief, transforming vague ideas, mixed feelings, and shaky commitments into dramatic clarity and alignment . . . They make visible abstract principles and inchoate conceptssuch as Justice (Lethal Theatre 343). Performance studies scholar Gunter Berghaus writes that ritual also functions as an ordering device and survival technique in times of crisis (65). Scholars of anthropology and performance theory have long pointed to a dynamic two-way relationship between ritual and theatre, examining how an understanding of one informs the other. Having looked at trials as ritual, we completed the triangular relationship to trials as theatre. By applying principles of dramatic theory and analysis to trials, we can illuminate the elements of theatre in trials: Stories are explored dramatically on a particular set, enacted by performers who play specific roles, wear costumes, and have specific blocking. According to attorney Richard Harbinger, an adversary trial is a dramatic thing put to legal use (122). He suggests that if one looks at a criminal trial as a play, one can see the play (the courtroom drama or the drama of the trial), and then a play within the play (the drama of the crime). In the courtroom drama, for example, the two protagonists (prosecuting attorney and defense attorney) battle to win control over the crime story. They also double for the protagonists of the crime storythe defense attorney representing the defendant, and the prosecutor representing the victim or state. The multiple layers of spectatorial positions in a trial range from witnesses to the alleged crime, to the judge, the jury, and the audience in the courtroom, to the wider public, who view, hear, or read about the spectacle of the trial. I see these as expanding framesfrom the inner frame around the story, crime, or injury, to the frame of the trial, to a wider frame, which is the play without , in which the wider public uses the trial as a way to consider a social issue, form opinions, and organize its experience. The play without fulfills this wide frame function most obviously in popular trials such as the 1925 Scopes (Monkey) trial. John Scopes, a high school biology teacher in Tennessee, was prosecuted for teaching Darwins theory of evolution. This trial and the tremendous media attention it received served to mediate a deep conflict between science and religion in the US, and became a focus for popular debate, humor, and entertainment. The trial was broadcast live on Chicago radio and covered by over one hundred news reporters (Bernabo and Condit 56). In 1955, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lees play, Inherit the Wind, reinterpreted and gave new form to the play without. Ironically, it was

152 Lucy Winner not until three years after the Broadway production that the Encyclopedia Brittanica added an entry on the trial (Bernabo and Condit 82). The drama of the play seemed to magnify the drama of the trial, and to shape subsequent popular discourse. Legal scholars note that trials are not the most expedient route to justice. 3 Why, then, are trials performed in a courtroom, rather than efficiently handled on the basis of documents alone, or discussions in private chambers? Legal theorist Bernard Hibbitz suggests that performed trials have a number of functions. They provide structured opportunities for expressions of dissent (5), and democratize the law by calling the community to witness, and by making it collectively responsible for the laws effectuation (3). Acting out the law in trials helps us to think it through. Finally, Hibbitz suggests that participants, particularly jurors, get a kind of cathartic satisfaction . . . by serving as instruments of deliberation and decision. He further posits that performed law is potentially enjoyable and restorative, accentuating the ludic [playful] quality of the law (5). 4 Of course, for our students, this begins to touch on the media fascination with performed trials, real and ripped from the headlines. 5 We know that for the ancient Athenian citizen, going to the theatre was both ludic and restorative, as well as an act of citizenship that played a fundamental role in a more or less democratic society. It was the civic responsibility of citizens (male property holders) to attend the theatre at the citys annual Dionysia festival. Theatre was a way for the community to come to know itself, to understand through image what was otherwise perhaps obscure or alien. Theatre has long been understood to offer an opportunity for spectators to grapple with major issues of their lives. Its purpose, says Shakespeares Hamlet, is to hold . . . the mirror up to nature ( Ham . 3.2). Through empathy, identification, and reason, audiences struggle with core ethical, psychological, social, and spiritual issues. Another way theatrical performance communicates and engages differently from reasoned assessment of facts is suggested by Conquergoods discussion of an observation by Frederick Douglass about African American slave songs. Douglas writes: In the most boisterous outbursts of rapturous sentiment, there was ever a tinge of deep melancholy. . . . I have sometimes thought the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress truly spiritual-minded men and women with the soul-crushing and death-dealing character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes (979). In this instance, performance becomes an opportunity for protest and forbidden expression, made more compelling by its tug on spectators emotions. Being an audience member (listening) is an opportunity for understanding deeply. Conquergood suggests that Douglasss recommendation of responding to a performance over reading of whole volumes allows relocation, copresence, humility, vulnerability, listening to and being touched by the protest of enslaved peoples (Performance Studies 149; emphasis in original). This possibility proposes a more radical role for empathic experience and the possibility that, as theatre scholar and critic Jill Dolan proposes, people can be persuaded toward radical change through empathy and unexpected identification with those once considered other or alien to them . . . as well as through Brechtian alienation (6). We can look at Douglasss insightthat we see certain things through performance in a different way from how we can through written textas ap-

Democratic Acts 153 plicable to the notion of acting out our citizenship. As the slave songs that Douglass describes provided an opportunity for empathy and unexpected identification, public, performed, even televised trials may fulfill such a function in our society. They may be opportunities for participants, spectators, and the public to rehearse, consider, and develop surprising empathiesand to perform their parts as citizens. They may even, as Hibbitz suggests, bring ludic pleasure. Legal theorist Paul Berman strikingly illuminates the way trials, like theatre, air differing points of view and create empathy for the other, and illustrates examples of the community value of performed trials. Consider the following: A swarm of rats is accused of eating the communitys crops of barley. When the rats do not appear at a formal trial in response to a summons, their lawyer successfully argues that they need time to gather and make the long trip to the courthouseand that, although eager to appear, they have not been afforded adequate protection from the feline dangers of their journey. One might expect to find such fables in Aesop, but, in fact, these proceedings are neither fiction nor anomalies, but an example of countless documented accounts of carefully conducted trials of animals in Europe, mostly in the Middle Ages, but some as late as the nineteenth century. Perhaps even more surprisingly, inanimate objects (statues or pillars) that fell upon and killed humans were put on trial in ancient Greece. A special court of the Acropolis, called the Prytaneion, was dedicated to trying three kinds of cases: where the murderer was unknown or unfindable (for example, Oedipus); where death was caused by an inanimate object (excluding those understood to be acts of God, such as lightning bolts); and, finally, where a human was killed by an animal (296). Bermans accounts make strange (in the Brechtian sense) the proceedings of a trial. The alienating effect of animals as defendants clearly illuminates, for the contemporary reader, the ritual process and community function of a performed trial. These trials did not function to adjudicate disputes, nor did they potentially dissuade rats or pillars from future crimes. However, these courtrooms provided a place for conflicting beliefs to be acted out. In a particularly strange and vivid example of such debates, Berman points to a trial of weevils, accused of infesting vineyards in Saint Julian, France in 1545. The prosecution and defense argued such questions as: Was the infestation a sign from God, which should be answered by prayer and religious ritual? Had the animals been granted the right to the vine leaves by God, as documented in Genesis, chapter 1, verse 30to every thing that creepeth upon the earth . . . I have given every green herb for meat? What was the relative position of animals and humans in the universe? Did humans or only God have the right to judge and punish animals? Were animals subject to human or divine law? Fascinatingly, as the weevil trial continued over a long period of time without resolution, the townspeople apparently took the law into their own hands. They negotiated a contract with the insects, granting them use of a tract of land of their own, with some provisions in case the townspeople needed to retreat to the land, for example, in times of war. Using Turners four-part sequence of social drama as a model, Berman likens performed trials to redressive action and integration or recognition of irreparable schism (stages three and four). His work shows that even trials not

154 Lucy Winner concerned with pragmatic results incorporate rituals whose performative functions overlap with those of theatre, creating community stories to help a community heal from a breach or crisis, and bringing a certain order to a frightening and disordered world. In addition, it suggests that trials provide a stage upon which conflicting points of view can be articulated and argued, finally creating a consensus narrative that attempts to unify the philosophical, spiritual, political, or moral values of the community. Even in extreme circumstances, when the outcome of a trial cannot actually have a real effect, its ceremony can provide a way for the public to participate in and to think about large ethical issues and even to practice empathyin this case, with other species.

As a play is often a mirror of its time, so is a trial. A public trial can function dramatically to reinforce prevailing notions and prejudices. In a different historical period, the trial transcript brings those prevailing notions and prejudices to light for later audiences to see. An examination of the trial of Joan of Arc provides such a mirror. In a society where institutions are firmly entrenched, as was church-dominated Europe during the Middle Ages, the trial can sometimes be a conserving force, providing a platform for the wider audience to reaffirm social norms. In a less stable circumstance, a popular trial may be more contentious (Arnold 142). In addition, an examination of Joans trial emphasizes a different kind of empathywith the political outlaw. Ideally, according to legal theorist Thurmond Arnold, a trial overshadows all other ceremonies as a dramatization of the values of spiritual government . . . representing the state as enforcer of law and, at the same time, the dignity of the individual, even when he is an avowed opponent of the State, a dissenter, a radical or even a criminal (130). Arnold used the transcript of the trial of Joan of Arc to reveal the way trials can help a society to define itself for history, and leave a record . . . [of] blind phobias which from time to time make themselves a part of law (141). According to Arnold, although the judges in Joans trial were clearly motivated by political pressure to find her guilty, the trial record reveals a mirror in which we see reflected our own ideas of what a fair trial should be (135). In fact, Arnold asserts, the only missing . . . modern [1935] requirement is that Joan is not represented by counsel. She does, however, represent herself with astuteness and legal skill (137). 6 When Joans trial is read from a historical distance, it can provide the kind of alienation that Brecht talks about as a way to see blind phobias. The trial transcript, though clearly not a totally reliable document, has functioned repeatedly as a script for later readers to dramatize the trial and help develop the play withoutthe larger social and political drama surrounding the inner story of Joans trial. The readers have found the trial strange, and this has, in turn, illuminated their own historical moment. Because heresy trials no longer seemed natural to Western society, it was through subsequent, repeated rereadings over time that Joan was rehabilitated as a saint and later became an ideal tragic hero. 7 Even in its own historical moment, Arnold believes, the trial of Joan of Arc afforded the possibility of the kind of democratic empathy that Dolan writes

Democratic Acts 155 aboutidentification with the alien or other. In fact, he seems to suggest that when prosecutors are supported by the weight of law and the approbation of society, even they can sometimes afford to empathize with the outlaw. This empathy can itself provide a small measure of fairness, as when, according to Arnold, the judges declined to torture Joan even though torture was routinely used in such cases (138). Trials conducted in the context of social instability and flux can sometimes illuminate injustice in their own time. In 1935, as Arnold was writing about Joan of Arc, and the Great Depression deepened in the United States, the Scottsboro trial was being conducted in Alabama. In this case, nine black teenage boys were accused of gang-raping two white girls while hoboeing on a freight train. Contrasting the two cases, Arnold suggests that only a feeling of security . . . can create an atmosphere where the underdog is given a chance. According to Arnold, the Southern courts were not confident of the reasonableness of the assumptions that underlay this trial. This caused them to engage in cover-ups and other unfair proceedings. He noted:
If the Alabama courts in the Scottsboro case dared to say that as a matter of principle Negroes were not entitled to sit on juries, and that Negroes who had intercourse with white women were to be treated as white men who committed rape, we would find a calm atmosphere which is now completely lacking. (142)

In such a case, the trial would have played out according to racist but legal principles that some of the public believed in. However, not only was the trial unfair by virtue of the existing racist law, it did not even follow those laws. Arnold believed that it was those violations of the then-current law that brought an uproar of nationwide attention to this case. In other words, this analysis points again to the importance of enactment to the functioning of the ideals of democratic processes. The dramatization of the case, the ritual of it, allowed the public to analyze the prejudices and phobias which caused the unfair proceedings. This analysis, in turn, spurred an interracial alliance and eventually led to a Supreme Court decision that allowed blacks to serve on juries. 8 In such a case, the trial can unintentionally serve as a kind of political theatre in its own time, to engage and perhaps enrage the public, to bring unconscionable truths and practices to light.

Class Action II: Contemporary Mirrors At the time of our class, another public trial was taking place. Four white New York City police officers were accused of shooting an unarmed West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, forty-one times outside his own home when he reached for what turned out to be his wallet. The trial was moved out of the Bronx, where the incident took place, to upstate New York, putatively to assure a fairer trial away from the local publicity, and from a local audience who might well identify with the victim, the person they saw as the main character. However, the judge ruled that the trial could be televised (for the first time since the famous trial of O. J. Simpson) so that the citizens of New York City could watch it. Ironically, this created an even larger public audience than could have attended in the Bronx.

156 Lucy Winner Jessie and I recorded Court TV airings of the trial and showed taped segments at each class meeting. Students applied the tools of dramatic analysis and performance theory to the trial in the courtroom (the play within), and to the concurrent street protests (the play without). We also followed the public debates which arose in the media about police brutality and racial profiling, looking at how the story was positioned and repositioned, how pieces were reenacted with differing protagonists and from different points of view. We watched as the defendants chose to testify and showed seemingly real distress and remorse. Although the police were found not guilty, the police department moved to disband the elite unit involved in the killing. Although protests continued, there were no riots. It seemed to us that there was room for competing narrativesthe ugly crisis of police brutality and racial profiling, and the stories of aggressive police crackdowns against crime in the city, as well as the narratives that suggested the complexities of policing in a racially divided environment. Discussions among our racially and economically diverse students mirrored the public debates; they were eager for the opportunity for debate and dissent around issues critical to the lives of city dwellers. We then had an opportunity to go one step further, outside the walls of the classroom and inside the walls of the courtroom. Jessie was clerking for Judge Korman, who was hearing the case of the Holocaust survivors against the Swiss banks. This was a fairness hearing on the results of a class action suit brought against the Swiss banks by victims of the Nazis. This move had two purposes: to allow students to analyze a live trial as ritual and theatre, and to give them an opportunity to experience themselves as a part of that performance. A handful of students met me very early in the morning at the District Courthouse in Brooklyn. Despite all of my research, I had actually never been to a live trial. My father fled Prague in 1939, so I felt a particular connection to this case. As the students and I sipped our coffee in line, we were joined by members of the class that was filing suit, who all reminded me of my central European Jewish relatives. What struck me was the combination of a kind of formality and ritual surrounding the courtroom and an Old-World feel to the arriving cast/audience. I listened to small conversations around methe familiar cadence and syntax reversals Vould you maybe a coffee take? There was a sense of being in a theatre lobby before a show, and, at the same time, the kind of anticipation and concentration that exists backstage before opening night. I learned only later that my father (and thus, me, as his daughter) was an official member of the class, complicating my position as teacher/observer. I was officially one of the protagonists and a part of the intended audience of the story within, as well as a member of the more critical/analytical audience to the play without that I had created with my class. In a memorandum, Judge Korman described the nature of the lawsuit: The plaintiffs alleged that
. . . in knowingly retaining and concealing the assets of Holocaust victims, accepting and laundering illegally obtained Nazi loot and transacting in the profits of slave labor, Swiss institutions and entities, including the named defendants, collaborated with and aided the Nazi regime in furtherance of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, slave labor and genocide. . . . Plaintiffs sought an accounting, disgorgement, compensatory and punitive damages, and declaratory and other appropriate relief. (2)

Democratic Acts 157 The hearing was to consider the fairness of the proposed $1.25 billion settlement. This experience allowed my students to grapple, in a more nuanced fashion, with the idea of trials as dramatic acts. Beyond putting to work what they had learned about ritual and dramatic theory and jurisprudence, they could learn from their own empathic experience as an engaged audience at a live performance. This was an opportunity to move beyond traditional participant observation to what Conquergood called an ethnography of the ears and heart . . . coperformative witnessing, and to consider the purposes of calling a community together to perform such a moment (Performance Studies 149). My students and I, having joined the community, sat in the audience facing the judge. The witnesses faced in the same direction, although they were clearly aware of our presence behind and sometimes cheated so we could see their faces. It was upon the judges face that I focused. I was struck by the quality of active listening that made his face, the lift of his chin, the occasional sigh, a kind of mirror of my own attention. I was conscious that he represented authority. I was moved by this. Because this was a fairness hearing, the attorneys talked about what fairness might entail in this situation. The council for the Swiss banks suggested that this settlement should bring complete closure with respect to the concerns and allegations relating to Switzerlands role in World War II. 9 A woman representing the Commission of Looted Art in Europe argued that art and other cultural objects should be excluded from the settlement. She told the story of a woman looking for a piece of art that used to hang in her childhood home. Her father had later given it to her sister as a wedding present. When her sister died in the Holocaust, the painting was lost. This painting had just been discovered in a public collection in Switzerland. If the settlement were to provide complete closure and art were not excluded, the piece could never be returned to the family. You want complete closure? asked an aged survivor. Bring me back my father . . . bring me back my whole family . . . Its not fair, so we settle . . . It can never be complete closure. Ironically, this line provided a measure of closure (catharsis, perhaps) for the audience of survivors. What do we settle for? How do we go on living in and with an unjust situation? During the long day we saw multiple dramas played out, raising layers upon layers of complicated and gripping issues for my students: the nature of reconciliation, forgiveness and closure; the meaning of fairness; how memory and meaning reside in the tangible objects of our lives. We were witness to an occasion that allowed people an opportunity to act out, in a public, symbolic way, a response to what had been intolerable. For those in the class of the suit, in the play within, this could not fundamentally change history. It did offer an opportunity to retell; to bear witness to their own experience; to act in relation to a situation in which they had once been rendered powerless; to publicly speak, perhaps contentiously, of a situation in which they had once been silenced. Further, by being a performance with a coherent structure, removed from everyday life, this experience provided a structure with enough distance from the events to allow reflection and focus. It raised questions that were cathartic, and called upon a sense of community to address a traumatic history.

158 Lucy Winner In the play without, this hearing, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, signaled to the wider world and attempted to make fairness and reparations part of the public discourse. 10

Class Action III: Jury Duty Midway through our class I was called for jury duty. Having arranged numerous deferments for years (some real, some cynical), I had no more grounds on which to refuse. Accepting that I must attend, I told Jessie about the strategies I planned to use to make sure I was not actually picked for a jury. After all, I said, I dont believe in the justice of our justice system. I dont, in particular, believe in the prison system. How can I be a part of this? And anyhow, it wouldnt be fair for me to participate because I am so biased. Jessie was furious. Invoking my responsibilities as a citizen, she shouted at me, You live here! You are a part of this system. Who else is going to sit on a jury? Take your conflicts and dig into them in a jury box. You are exactly the kind of person who should be there. Do you think others arent biased? You are less likely to be swayed by them. Anyhow, my god, we are teaching this class now. Its a perfect time for you to do this. I allowed myself to be convinced, and thus began my personal struggle with my lived performance as a potential juror. This was a chance to act as participant/observer in the areas we had been theorizing about. However, my desire to enter the courts as a researcher was somewhat thwarted by my visceral response to this experience. I learned in high school that our society is predicated on the notion that to be a citizen is to act on what you believe. For years I understood theatre to be a means of engaging as a citizen, and of contesting social ills. I have often felt a burning desire for those means. To my surprise, I found myself intrigued, even obsessed, with my upcoming juror role, reframed in theatrical context. On the day I was called, I woke up in the morning and tried to figure out how to dress. The role I would play was citizenaverage. I wanted to look respectful, smart, and open-minded. Did I want to appear liberal? Radical? Conservative? Flamboyant? I struggled with the outside layer, the fabric of my role, my costume. I settled on a cotton jumper, linen jacket, and sandals. I had chosen what for me was a neutral look. As I entered the courthouse, space and time begin to alter. I went up long stone stairs, through metal detectors, past people in official uniforms. I followed signs, as in a maze, to the jury waiting room. I was here to learn my part. There was a videotape for me, the juror, telling me about my role. There was a jurors handbook. Hours passed. Each time a list of names was calledWould James, Cartwright, Schmidt, Kelly, Marino . . . proceed to room B?I felt a small letdown. I wanted in. My name was finally called, and I joined a clump of alternately excited, bored, chatty citizens outside Courtroom D, waiting to be summoned by the court officer. Once inside, all aspects of the room signaled to me a theatre set. Thick, dark, sturdy, and elegant wooden rails clearly delineated the spaces and evoked dignity. These helped me determine who would play what roles and the specifics of our parts and places. The judge, on high.

Democratic Acts 159 The so far unselected potential jurors, behind the railing. The jury box, now empty, stage right, with two rows of neatly numbered seats behind another thick rail, facing stage center. And then, down on the floor, the desks and seats for the main characters facing the judges bench at a slight angle. The prologue began for us, the regular citizens. We heard that the case involved a possible gang-related shooting. We heard that we might go late into the evenings, that we might go beyond the coming weekend. The judge asked those of us who would be unable to fulfill these obligations to excuse ourselves. I thought of our Thursday night class and decided to take a chance. After all, if I was locked into the theatre of the law, Jessie could lead the group. I was selected for the voir direliterally, to speak the truthan examination designed to establish the competency of a juror or witness. 11 I must admit that I felt a little thrill of delight to be cast in this featured role. I was Juror #1, and I moved proudly into my seat to audition for the part. I felt totally committed to the notion of speaking the truth. It occurred to me that this was, in acting terms, my character objective. The defense attorney was a youngish woman with a long ponytail, very conservative suit, and high heels. Legal Aid, I presumed. The defendant was brought in. Immediately, I switched out of my detached analytical mode to empathy. I saw a young African American mana boy, really. Maybe fifteen, maybe younger. I tried not to stare so hard. He was typecast, I thought: the young contrite ex-gang member. I immediately felt as though I should be his defender. He was about to be put away in a brutal prison system, and his life was over. Whatever happened next would be part of the tremendously powerful script of the correctional system. I heard the story: The defendant was accused of shooting another young man on a street corner in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, not far from where my daughters best friend lived, where I walked, where she played. I looked up at the defendant, who was looking down. There was only one eyewitness. I jumped to alert. I remembered our classs discussion on Jerome Franks study of eyewitness identification: the inaccuracy of cross-racial identification, the influence of stress, and the tendency to focus on a weapon rather than a face. 12 I was suddenly more and more certain that I was here to assure that this kid would get off. Then I remembered the off-stage character, the kid who had been shot. I flipped back and forth between the defendant and the victim for a minute. I saw myself as a character in a silent movie, jerkily dancing back and forth from my position as defender of the defendant to defender of the one who was shot. My head reeled as I did this. What could I have been thinking? How would I ever know? How would I live with myself? I felt I must dedicate myself to finding THE TRUTH. But I knew, or I thought I knew, that that was not necessarily what these lawyers were here to do. They were here to perform and present and compete, to convince me. Would I be able to see past the most convincing performance? I must get off this jury, I thought. But if not me, who? I called on the sense of what being a citizen has meant to me, and how much more power-

160 Lucy Winner ful I felt when I could protest, march, do guerilla theatre in middle-American malls. I would plant myself in peoples faces, in tableaux of news photos, frozen in the role of the student crouching over her dead friend at Kent State. That , I understood as enacting citizenship, as worthwhile theatre, as fighting for justice. Would this be a stage upon which to contest? In court, my role was defined by sets of rules that made a resistant performance difficult, if not impossible. I stayed, partly in my role as researcher/participant/observer, but aware that I felt a tug toward the center of the performance. We were being questioned. First by the judge, then in turn by the young prosecutors and the defense attorney. First, basic questions of identity. Then, raise your hands if: There is a reason why you could not be impartial on this case. You or a friend or member of your family have ever been accused or convicted of a street crime involving a weapon. You or a friend or member of your family have ever been the victim of a street crime. You have heard of the Crips or the Bloods. Several years ago my then seven-year-old daughter had come home from school, breathlessly demanding that we throw out everything in her wardrobe that had red in it. She was terrified she would be slashed by the Bloods. Molly said so. Molly, the same child who told her that if you look in the mirror and say Bloody Mary three times, you would die. The Bloods, I said. I only knew about the stories that circulated around the elementary schools, all far from the truth. Have you or anyone in your family or anyone you are close to been the victim of a crime involving a weapon? A gun? My hand was up again. Two weeks after we moved into our apartment in Brooklyn, as I was finishing putting my daughter to bed, my husband, who is white, came home from an errand to the corner store and called me from the door in a strange, raspy voice. He had just been held up at gunpoint one-half block from our house. He had seen two young African American boys, maybe thirteen, hanging out. He sensed something but hesitated to cross the street, suspecting his instincts as racist. The building next to ours is almost completely filled with an extended Haitian family. But what he sensed was, perhaps, a different kind of signal. One of the boys was suddenly behind him and the one in front shoved a gun into my husbands belly and asked for his wallet. My husband described a stop-time moment when he suddenly realized that fear could cause the trigger finger to grip. He handed over his wallet and left unharmed. I looked across at the kid in the courtroom and saw someone who looked too young to carry a gun. But my husband said those who mugged him were barely teenagers. I saw the scenes of the two events fold over each other. The two images were stuck in the same slot in the slide projector. I thought of my eye exercise, trying to make two images converge into one. Put the bird in the nest, the letter in the mailbox. But I relaxed my vision to see if I could separate these two narratives. I felt sure I could. I told this to the defense attorney. Did this experience change your feelings about hand-gun possession? she asked. No, I replied, I have always had the same opinion. And what is your opinion?

Democratic Acts 161 That guns shouldnt be possessed. Except, of course, for law enforcement, she nodded, as if we all understood what I really meant. But I thought about the Amadou Diallo case and the trial I had watched with my class. Well, no, I replied, maybe not even the police. The quiet in the courtroom was broken. Laughter, murmurs, maybe even applause. The audience. I had found a tiny opening. Clearly, now, I wanted in. This was the first moment when I felt some combination of ludic pleasure and social commitment. A few more questions and we were dismissed for lunch. We were instructed not to talk to each other, and should we by chance see any of the lawyers or the defendant outside of the courtroom, we were to act as if we had not seen them, and they us. We let go of the special ties we had inside this room, and we de-roled. 13 I bought a salad and ate too quickly. I was filled with a strange mixture of adrenaline and a kind of ennui, not yet knowing my role. I tried to remain neutral. I could not somehow leave this story behind to read my book, but was too emotionally involved to report my observations of the process in the notebook I had brought. I checked my phone messages. There was a message from my husband, Tim. He sounded strangely quiet and calm. He told me that he was on his way to the airport, that his mother, whose own stories had been claimed years ago by Alzheimers, was dying. He was rushing off to her in Vermont. I realized that I could no longer participate in this other narrative. I felt a deep ache in my stomach and in my throat. On Court Street I began to cry: for Tim, for his mother and her lost stories, for his brothers and sisters, because someone was dying, and oddly, for the defendant whose story I realized I could no longer play in. But suddenly I realized that I really was inside this trial, and that I felt a strong empathetic connection to it. I couldnt just walk out. I couldnt just leave a message. I had to determine, and follow, proper procedure. There was a structure here. Like in a play or ritual, there were prescribed ways to exit. I went back up the long stone steps and found a court official. He told me that I must speak to the judge, after the voir dire resumed. If this was really a performance, I could not just wave goodbye backstage. My exit must be played out within the performance. I waited outside the courtroom for forty-five minutes. I wondered how I would tell the judge, how I would get his attention, way up on his podium. Would I just wave my hand, like in a class? Would there be a moment when he would ask if anyone had anything to say? I realized that I had stage fright. We filed back in. There I was, Juror #1, in my seat. The judge entered. All rise. The defendant, the attorneys and prosecutors, the court reporter, and the court officers. Places. Action. I looked up. I did not know my lines. The script had changed. I needed to take an initiative that was not, as far as I understood it, part of my role.

162 Lucy Winner I saw the court officer approach the judge. The judge leaned down to hear. He looked up, and said, in his calm, almost monotone, voice, I am told that Juror #1 would like to speak to me. Juror #1, please approach the bench. I rose, all eyes on me, slid out of my place, crossed down across center stage and walked up to the bench. As I looked up at the judge, I was flanked by several of the main characters, the defense attorney, and both prosecuting attorneys. I just learned that my mother-in-law is dying, and I must leave town. The judges face softened, and he looked right into my eyes. I was deeply moved by the first show of emotion on his face. Im terribly sorry. You are excused. My sympathies and good luck to you, he said. I left the courtroom. It was, after this bit of formality, fairly easy to disengage, even though I came to realize that I was taking a part of this story with me. After Tims mothers funeral, I returned to New York. The trial was surely over. But it had changed the course of at least one persons life. I decided to return to the courthouse and try to find out what had happened. I went there professionally attired. The visuals that I recalled had changed. I had remembered columns; there were none. In my mind the stage set of the court had columns. Going through the metal detectors, I joked with the security guards. Looks pretty messy, I laughed as the x-ray version of my bag appeared. This time my character was charming. In the jury postponement room, I approached a woman, very thin, with dyed black hair and olive skin. A wad of iridescent, Day Glogreen gum appeared and disappeared in her mouth to a regular, almost sultry, beat. I watched the flashes of green for three, maybe five, minutes. She finally mumbled something. Did you say something to me? I asked. I said can I help you? she replied, still flashing green. I hope so. I was wondering whether there are any records of what voir dires are held on what day. She still was not looking at me. Why would you need that? I told her about my half day of voir dire, said that I was a writer and that I wanted to find out what had happened in the case. She paused, looked directly at me for a second or two. Try the information booth in room. . . . Eventually, after a few more twists, I faced Ron Schwartz, the gray-haired, affable criminal court clerk. He took an interest in me, questioning me like a

Democratic Acts 163 witness. Judges name? What did he look like? What courtroom was I in? What floor? Eight? I guessed. Well, I know it was high up. He laughed. I mistrusted my visual memory, but guessed: middle aged, darkish hair, glasses, no facial hair, wearing judges robes, I think. Ron Schwartz was amused. We agreed that I wouldnt make a very good witness. But when I left him, I had a mission. If I could find out from the jury clerk what section I was assigned to, he could tell me who the judge was, and I might be able to get a transcript of the trial. I had an ally. I went back to the dark-haired green-chewing-gum lady. She knew exactly what to do and found my juror card quickly. Now she wanted to help. She asked what I remembered about the case. I said I thought the defendant was a kid. Probably, she said. They all are. Just kids. She finally looked at me. I noticed that she had brown eyes. She left and came back with a list of all the criminal court judges. She held tightly onto one corner of the page and tilted it towards me, almost out of my eyesight. I sensed that she was not supposed to be showing me this, but she told me which ones might fit my description and asked if I recognized any names. I could not pick him out. We both noticed an elderly man behind me, there to do what one is supposed to do in this room. He was representing a friend or neighbor who had been called for jury duty. He was angry and anxious. She is completely disabled! he protested. (I could hear that English was not his first language.) Are you related to her? my new ally asked. She is blind, if you ask. She cant walk, if you ask. She cant even read this! His hands shook wildly as he held out a form. Are you related to her? I am here FOR her. Could you bring her a form to fill out? She cant see! She shouldnt get this! His voice was raised and strained. He was terrified and outraged. Unlike me, I thought, he was not finding his way into this legal system. I headed back to Ron Schwartz, who could now easily identify my judge. Michael Juvelier, he told me with a smile, Hes probably the smartest judge we have. I wondered about my elation, not at finding the name, but at finding out he was smart. I was glad, I guess, because this boded well for a fair outcome of the trial. The rest of the story is short. I made several phone calls to the judges chambers and eventually learned the defendant was found not guilty. Because he was a minor, the transcript was sealed. I was sorry, in a way, not to find my way back into the story, but somehow relieved by the verdict. I had left the defendant in the beginning, not knowing

164 Lucy Winner the whole story, and my guilt about that was now relieved. Perhaps I had needed to return for the cathartic satisfaction that Hibbitz talked about. Perhaps it was because of my sense of responsibility to the person who had died. Or, because of my empathy for the young boy, the outsider/protagonist/other. Or, I simply needed to finish the play. All of these, together, led me to think about how jurors enact democracy. A judge can say something, and make it so. A juror, a regular citizen, once cast, can find her way into the story. She can form an opinion and argue a position, which takes bravery and the ability to make confident speech acts. Although the rules and structure of the court system are strict, and make a resistant performance difficult, there are still moments when a juror can speak, and if she does so bravely enough, she, too, might be able to say something and make it so.

Epilogue This journey into the content, forms, and pedagogy of performing democracy yielded three insights. The first is reflected in Conquergoods nourishing ground of participatory experience, here interpreted in the context of pedagogical practice (Performance Studies 153). My experience confirmed that when one is studying a process of enactment and a subject that engages issues of our time, one does well to enter that world and, to whatever extent possible, put oneself inside it. Further, there is something inherently good about coperformative witnessing (Conquergood, Performance Studies 149) and, when possible, actually performing democracy: not just for learning and personal growth, but because democracy of the people and by the people points to the necessity of enactment and participation. The second insightthe value of a plurality of such enactments, depending on the momentresolved my conflict about having to choose between street protests and more officially sanctioned forms of participation. These first two insights combined to become an essential part of my practice, not just as a citizen but also as a teacher. I now regularly include a field component in theatre studies of many kinds, encouraging students to experience and analyze the cultural role of performance beyond theatre, to include such things as trials, demonstrations, and elections. One week after the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, as I sat with a group of students, this took on even more meaning. One student, a professional actor, confessed that she could no longer see any reason to floss her teeth, so how could she motivate herself to think about theatre? We felt we needed to find a bridge, a way to act. We resolved to become participant/observers and together began to look at the multiple performance rituals that sprang up all around us. We watched as firefighter funerals were staged on the streets of our city. Fields of flowers covered firehouse entrances and sidewalks, lit by hundreds of candles. Photos, notes, prayers, and poems taped to walls formed a backdrop to silent vigils. Flags appeared everywhere, some waved as props and others pinned as accessories onto clothes. Patriotic fervor brought audiences to their feet to sing the Star Spangled Banner with Broadway casts. This same fervor brought tourists to New York City to touch the tragedy, to support the economy, and to go to the citys newly created theatre, Ground Zero. These were performances

Democratic Acts 165 of mourning and loss, some of rage, some of patriotism, but together they served as unifying rituals that attempted to heal the community. And then, in 2002, many people moved into the streets once more to protest the actions of our government as it prepared for war with Iraq. I was among them, standing in the freezing and crowded streets of New York City, hemmed in by crowd-control barricades and mounted police. Nearby, a group of teenage girls, arms linked, flushed with perhaps their first opportunity to publicly demonstrate their political convictions, began passionately chanting:
THIS is WHAT deMOcracy LOOKS LIKE! THIS is WHAT deMOcracy LOOKS LIKE!

Soon the chant filled the street. Finally, the third insight is that this study of theatre and law points the way to a pedagogical practice which allows theatre students to examine the workings of our own democracy. For example, an understanding of the role of the performance of a public trial for the wider audience, beyond the play within, sheds a harsh light on the absence in recent years of performed democracy on the part of our government. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has restricted public access to government deliberations. At the same time, it is shrinking the rights of citizens to privacy and due process. The most egregious examples of this trend are to be found in the refusal to follow international law, such as the Geneva Convention, in the treatment of foreign citizens detained in the name of national security. Hundreds of prisoners are being held as illegal combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without access to lawyers or contact with families. Although the United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the Guantanamo detainees have the right to a hearing, none has been tried. The military tribunals, if they ever happen, are to be secret, allowing a formal enactment of the idea of trial, which the public will never see. In these performances, according to British Lord of Appeal Johan Steyn, the military will act as interrogators, prosecutors, defense counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners (3). As Thurmond Arnold would no doubt remind us, this move toward efficiency signals a move away from dramatized, fair, public proceedings, and a lack of tolerance for the playing out of contradictory social values (130). In this moment in American history, performances which engender empathy for the other are restricted, if they are allowed at all. This absence of public trial performance renders the prisoners and their situation invisible and secret. In addition, it means that in this case there is no play without. There will be no occasions that call the community to witness, help us to organize and understand this experience, give us what Hibbitz called structured opportunities for dissent, opportunities to develop empathy for the otherliterally aliencombatants, or to provide a historical record of what Arnold called blind phobias. Still, this story ends, for me, on a hopeful note. What I and, I trust, my students have learned is that performing democracy is key to the health of our society. Engaging in these performances is part of what connects us all as citizens. This understanding propels us, even in these most difficult times, to find ways to act, and to urge our government to recommit to the rituals and dramas of democracy.

166 Lucy Winner

Lucy Winner is Professor of Theatre at Empire State College, State University of New York, an alternative college for adults. She mentors performing artists returning to school in midcareer, teaches theatre and interdisciplinary studies such as theatre and community practices and theatre of the law, working with performing artists as well as school nurses, police officers, teachers, and human service workers.

Notes
I would like to thank Jessie Allen for a truly inspiring collaboration, Jan Cohen-Cruz and Alan Mandell for generous multiple readings and conversations, Richard Kuhns, Leslie Satin, Jane Desmond, and Deborah Mutnick for insightful comments at various stages, and Tim Connor for excellent, relentless editingalso Joan Herrington and Theatre Topics readers for valuable suggestions. 1. Jessie Allen is Acting Assistant Professor of Law in the Lawyering Program at New York University School of Law and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University Law School. 2. In addition to the field of performance studies, there is also considerable scholarship in the practice of experiential learning, from Deweys early writings in the 1930s to contemporary critical analyses. For more discussions, see Boud et al., eds., Using Experience for Learning ; Dewey, Experience and Education ; Kolb, Experiential Learning ; Mezirow et al., Fostering Critical Reflection ; Michelson, Beyond Galileos Telescope; and Mulligan and Griffiths, eds., Empowerment through Experiential Learning . 3. See, for example, Arnold, Hibbitz, and Berman. 4. This ludic quality may help explain the fascination with televised courtroom dramas, ranging from Perry Mason, L.A. Law, Law and Order , and The Practice , to Court TV, on which actual trials are televised. 5. As in the television show Law and Order . 6. For divergent contemporary opinions about the fairness of the trial, see Wheeler and Wood, Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc . 7. Joans story has become the subject of many plays. The best known include Schillers The Maid of Orleans , Shaws St. Joan , Anouilhs The Lark, Shakespeares Henry VI, part 1 , and Brechts St. Joan of the Stockyards, as well as at least two operasVerdis Giovana dArco and Tchaikovskys The Maid of Orleans and over thirty films, including Dreyers The Passion of Joan of Arc. 8. For further discussion of the Scottsboro case, see Miller et al., Mother Ada Wright; and Carter, Scottsboro . 9. All quotes from this hearing are from my own observation, unless otherwise noted. A transcript of the hearing is available from the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York.

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10. Much has been written about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in this regard. See, for example, Llewellyn and Howse, Institutions for Restorative Justice. 11. The term voir comes from an old French word for truth. 12. For more discussion of the issue of eyewitness testimony, see Frank and Frank, Not Guilty and the judges opinion in United States v. Norwood. 13. This term comes from psychodrama and drama therapy, and is a process by which participants in an enactment achieve closure and distance themselves from the role they have been playing. See Blatner, Acting-In .

Works Cited
Allen, Jessie. Legal Magic: How Ritual Formality and Doctrinal Formalism Help Adjudication Shape our World JSD Diss. Columbia University, 2005. Arnold, Thurmond W. The Symbols of Government . New Haven: Yale UP, 1935. Berghaus, Gunter. Ritual and Crisis: Survival Techniques of Humans and Animals. On Ritual. Ed. Gunter Berghaus. Spec. issue of Perfomance Research 3.3 (Winter 1998): 6573. Berman, Paul Schiff. Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects. New York University Law Review 69 (May 1994): 288326. Bernabo, Lawrence, and Celeste Condit. Two Stories of the Scopes Trial: Legal and Journalistic Articulations of the Legitimacy of Science and Religion. Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law . Ed. Robert Harriman. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1990. 5585 Blatner, A. Acting-In: Practical Applications of Psychodramatic Methods. New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1988. Boud, D., R. Cohen, and D. Walker, eds. Using Experience for Learning. Buckingham, UK: Society into Research in Higher Education and Open UP, 1993. Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. 2nd ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984. Conquergood, Dwight. Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty. Theatre Journal 54.3(2002): 33967. . Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research. TDR 46.2 (2002):145 56. Cowell, Alan. U.S. Thumbs its Nose at Rights, Amnesty Says. New York Times 26 May 2005. A1.

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Dewey, John. Experience and Education. 1938. New York: Collier, 1963. Dolan, Jill. Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and Civic Engagement in Theatre and Performance Studies. Theatre Topics 11.1 (2001) 117. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom . 1855. New York: Dover, 1969. Frank, Jerome, and Barbara Frank (assoc. with Harold Hoffman). Not Guilty. Garden City: Doubleday, 1957. Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960. George, David. On Origins: Behind the Rituals. On Ritual. Ed. Gunter Berghaus. Spec. issue of Perfomance Research 3.3 (Winter 1998): 115. Harbinger, Richard. Trial by Drama. Judicature 55.3(1971): 1229. Hibbitz, Bernard J. De-Scribing the Law: Performance in the Constitution of Legality. Performance Studies Conference. Northwestern University, Chicago. March 1996. Kamenetz, Anya, THAW and the Lysistrata Projects AntiWarFareAristophanes vs Rumsfeld. Village Voice. <http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/ 0309,kamenetz,42131,11.html>. Kolb, D. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1984. Korman, Edward, R. In re: Holocaust Victim Assets Litigation , C96 Civ. 4849, E.D.N.Y., Memorandum and Order, August 2, 2000. Llewellyn and Howse. Institutions for Restorative Justice: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. University of Toronto Law Journal 159.3 (Summer 1999). Mezirow, J., and associates. Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990. Michelson, E. Beyond Galileos Telescope: Situated Knowledge and the Assessment of Experiential Learning. Adult Education Quarterly 46(4) (1996): 18596. Miller, Pennybacker, and Rosenhaft, Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 19311934. The American Historical Review 106.2 (2001): 64 pars. 11 May 2005 <http://www.historycooperative.org/cgibin/ justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/ ah000387.html>. Mulligan, J., and C. Griffin, eds. Empowerment through Experiential Learning. London: Kogan Page Ltd., 1992. Savage, Charlie. 4 Ex-Detainees Sue Rumsfeld, 10 Others. Boston Globe 28 October, 2004. A2+.

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Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology . Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985. Steyn, Johan. Guantanamo Bay: The Legal Black Hole. Theatre Program, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. The Culture Project, 2004. Turner, Victor. Drama, Fields and Metaphors . Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1974. . The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure . Chicago. Aldine Publishing Company, 1969. United States District Court, Eastern District of New York. Holocaust Victim Assets, CV-964899 (ERK), transcript of hearing, 29 November 1999. United States v. Norwood, 939 F.Supp. 1132 (D.N.J. 1996). Wheeler, Bonnie, and Charles T. Wood, eds. Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc . New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.