“Then you’ll do it?” The Judge dropped the pencil. “That’s fine, Johnny! Even if a slipup occurs and by some miracle Sarah Isbel gets on the jury to make a twelfth — or Hosey Lemmon changes his mind or Earl Scott insists on being wheeled over — I’d still have you as the alternate; you heard me lay the groundwork for a thirteenth juror.”
“But how can I serve on a jury here?” asked Johnny. “I’m not a voter. I’m not even a resident of this state. They’d never accept a stranger.”
“Well, not exactly a stranger, Johnny. You do carry the Shinn name. Anyway,” said the Judge, “they’re going to have to accept you. Did I ever tell you I know a dozen ways to skin a balky calf? Here’s one of them.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out two sheets of legal-size paper clipped together. It was a printed form, its blank spaces filled in by typewriter.
“You finagler,” said Johnny. “You have that all made out. What is it?”
“Where defending constitutional democracy and due process is concerned,” said Judge Shinn, “I’m an unmitigated scoundrel. Why, Johnny, this is a warranty deed relating to a piece of property I own at the western boundary of my holdings, a house and ten acres. The house is usually rented under a lease, but the last lessee moved two years ago and it’s stood untenanted ever since. This,” and the Judge took another paper from the drawer, “is a bill of sale. Under its terms I, Lewis Shinn, am selling you, John Jacob Shinn, the house and ten acres covered by the deed for the sum of — what do you offer?”
“At the moment,” said Johnny with a grin, “my checking account shows a balance of four hundred and five dollars and thirty-eight cents.”
“For the sum of ten thousand dollars in imaginary currency, and you will kindly sign a paper — this is my Yankee heritage speaking — promising to ‘sell’ the property back to me at the same terms when this is over. I don’t know how many laws I’m breaking,” said the Judge, “and I find myself singularly unable to worry about it just now. The point is, when Andy Webster gets here he can witness my signature and yours, and first thing tomorrow morning we’ll take the deed over to the Town Hall and have Burney Hackett in his capacity as town clerk record same, for which you will pay him out of hand the sum of four dollars, thereby becoming a Shinn Corners property owner entitled to all the responsibilities thereof, which under the ruling I’m going to make when the jury is empaneled will include your responsibility to serve on a Shinn Corners jury. There’s nothing impresses a Yankee more than the recording of a deed to a piece of land. Little side issues like length of residence, non-voting, and so forth, we shall conveniently ignore.”
Johnny was staring at the Judge in a puzzled way.
“What’s the matter?” said the Judge.
“I’m trying to squeeze a feeling of reality out of this,” said Johnny. “I don’t get it. I really don’t. All these shenanigans... Aren’t you whipping up an awfully big tempest for such a little teapot, Judge?”
“You think it’s little?”
“It’s subatomic. One man, who’s probably guilty to begin with! And you stand a whole town on its head, befuddle a bunch of perfectly capable cops and county officials, drag the governor of your state into it...”
Judge Shinn got out of his chair and began to pace up and down before his law books, his brows coming together as if meeting a challenge.
“One man,” he said slowly. “Yes, put that way it sounds ridiculous. But that’s only because you’re thinking of Josef Kowalczyk as if he existed in a vacuum. What’s one man? Well, Johnny, one man is not merely Josef Kowalczyk. He’s you, he’s me, he’s Hube Hemus — he’s everybody. It always starts with one man. A man named John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant, was tried for seditious libel in 1735 in New York for having published some polemical articles in his weekly. One man. Another man, named Andrew Hamilton, defended Zenger’s right to print the truth. Hamilton’s success in securing Zenger’s acquittal established freedom of the press in America.
“Someone has to keep on the alert, Johnny. We’ve been lucky. Luckier, maybe, than we deserve. We’ve always had someone to watch over us.
“You take the debates during the founding of the Constitution,” said Judge Shinn. “The debaters who demanded guarantees of procedural due process weren’t arguing from mere theory. The adoption of the Bill of Rights, in particular the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, had behind it real fears, fears that had grown out of actual happenings in colonial history. For instance, the witchcraft trials in Massachusetts in 1692.
