My civic duty

Oooh… I just love it when I can use a Scrubs inspired title for a blog post.

So, today I fulfilled my civic duty by spending a day in the jury pool. I know… fun, right?

Actually, not that bad. It would seem that the folks at this particular courthouse get the fact that no one wants to be there. In fact, I think many are working on their amateur night stand-up routines. I won’t get into the specifics of their comedy, suffice to say that it wasn’t half bad. Heck, even two judges were part of the act!

The decades old orientation video even provided some unintentional comedy. Not quite like a Hanso Foundation film reel, but maybe as old. I’m guessing by the clothing and hairstyles that this thing was filmed during my high school years, so late eighties.

All kidding aside, I will say that the folks were all very nice, especially those two judges and the two court officers babysitting us. This seemed in sharp contrast to the procedural folks I remember from my last dip in the pool 11-12 years ago. As for the folks in the pool itself, not so much. Most everyone was complaining amongst themselves about being there. In fact, I found one older woman so annoying about it I desperately wanted to see her selected no matter how many objections she had, which were numerous.

In fact, many people had a lot of objections, concerns, etc. before each of us were even questioned. I don’t know, seemed like a lot of them were doing so just as a way to get out of it. Heck, maybe they were all honest. After all, we did swear to answer truthfully beforehand, right?

Me? Well, I just quietly sat there and waited for anything that came. I didn’t voice any concerns and seeing as I was lucky #3 for the day, I was guaranteed a spot in the jury box because of it. Sure enough, that happened.

Yeah, I was likely stuck in that jury for at least the rest of today, Thursday and maybe even Friday.  You see, they didn’t even drag us over to a courtroom until just before 1.00. The judge came in and said, “Go to lunch and be back at 2.00.” Everyone grumbled and moaned… you see, if you make it to lunch, you are usually released for the day, but not us.

Anyway, inpanelment took about an hour and as I said, I was selected right up front, but then, due to likely two different factors, I got bounced out. The first was I have police officers in my family and that was listed on my questionnaire. This came into play because two of the three witnesses introduced were police officers. I’m pretty sure I noticed the defendant object to my sheet from where I was sitting. The second was probably because there was too much testosterone in the box. Six of seven jurors were male and the defendant was female.

When it was all said and done, they got it to a 4-3 split and I was headed home about 3.15. I was actually disappointed to not stay on because I really would like to sit on a trial at some point and this seemed like a fairly easy case to handle (no accused murderers here). However, it was good fortune that I was not picked as I would have missed another day or two of work and I am towards the end of transitioning out of my job to a new one.

So, while the day was long, especially having had to be there at 8.00(!), it was still productive in two respects: 1) I now know some of our justice system is full of nice and entertaining people and 2) I finally tucked into my Watchmen trade paperback. Some good reading there so far. (As expected!)