Jury Duty Blues

Last week I had the misfortune of having to serve on a jury.  Never mind who was on trial, what it was about, or how the trial ended.  It was, to me, utterly abysmal...comparable on my scale of personal suffering to having kidney stones, getting multiple fillings at the dentist, or undergoing a colonoscopy.  On Monday, when it was jury selection day, one of the interviewing attorneys asked the panel of prospective jurors one by one whether they enjoyed the previous times they served on a jury.  All who had served before assented...yes, they enjoyed it.  Until the hotshot prosecutor got to me, that is.  I told him no, I did not enjoy being on a jury.  I think the SOB held that answer of mine in the back of his mind as I was later selected, to my dismay, to be on a jury in a trial that lasted from Thursday morning to Friday evening. 

I dislike many things about jury duty, but I dislike the most how the jurists are bunched up together all of the time.  I couldn't even get away from the others for lunch. They seemed to be nice enough people to me, but they were not what I was there for, and I tired quickly of the few jurists who talked a lot, with me cooped in a small room with them, all of us seated facing one another around a circular table.  Yes, that got very old in a hurry...

When the trial began, the bailiff passed out blank yellow legal pads with pens to each of us serving on the jury.  The reason was to give us something to take notes on during the trial. The judge told us, though, that we didn't have to take notes if we didn't want to, and that suited me fine.  For I had discovered many years earlier that since I wasn't in the habit of ever reading my own notes, then writing them down would be pointless.  Besides, I listened to the attorneys present their evidence and was attentive to the different witnesses, remembering just about everything without needing to write anything down.  Unfortunately, it became clear to me that I was the only one who didn't take notes, while everyone else had written down copious amounts of stuff on their pads.  So I may have appeared to everyone else to not be engaged, while in fact the complete opposite was true. My ears and eyes were all wide open and I absorbed everything.

I felt bad about the eventual verdict, although I believe it was the correct and just one. I feel worse about the way the prosecutor and defense attorney went about manipulating the feelings of the jurists.  I disliked both of them and wondered how, under this system of justice, anyone could ever truly arrive at an accurate accounting of events with so much speculation and insinuation being thrown around.  On top of that, perhaps the most crucial witness in the entire case, one who was right there in the middle of the pertinent events and whose testimony could well have exonerated the accused, was mysteriously ignored by both sides. This reminded me of the previous time I had served on a jury in a trial.  That time it was the peculiar, unexplained behavior of the arresting police officer that left me scratching my head.  But what really left me wondering about last week's trial was the apparent rush to an arrest when matters could have been settled with neither party suffering any substantial harm.  Yes, that bothered me...although I ended up voting on the case based on the evidence, although incomplete, that WAS revealed to me.

After it was all over, the judge said that I would have at least one year before my name could once again be selected for jury duty.  Oh boy, I can hardly wait...