This week I kindly informed my superior, “With today’s and tomorrow’s cancellations, I have officially graduated from this jury service term…. In the name of celebration, I am now accepting pepperoni pizzas, extra jeans days, and Amazon.com gift certificates usable towards a Generac 5939 GP5500, 6,875-watt, 389cc OHV, portable, gas-powered generator.”
I’d been hoping for a good case to sit through, but as close as that ever came to happening was on my first day of service when I lasted only until the very end of the jury selection process before being dismissed. That particular case would have made for fascinating discussion in the jury room: the (college student?) defendant, while his neighbor was away from a couple weeks, cut a hole in the drywall between her townhouse and his, and when another neighbor came over to bring in the mail and check on the supposedly empty house, there the man was, naked.
In his jury questioning remarks, one of the three defense attorneys said that while the facts of the case were not in dispute, the “indecent exposure” charges were questionable on the basis of intent: Did the defendant intend to be seen without his clothes? (The jury apparently didn’t bite, and the man was sentenced to a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a year in jail.)
Being questioned during the jury selection process was itself a little like being on trial, although my answers were fairly innocuous: I’ve never been convicted of any crimes, I’m okay with “talking with strangers about parts of the human body,” and I didn’t think at the time that humans “have a fundamental right to be naked in front of other people,” so I think I was not intentionally dismissed from service as much as simply not chosen.
I tried not to–the judge said I shouldn’t–take my unchosen-ness personally, and went on my merry way, along with the man with rotten teeth who had asked during the jury service orientation what happens if he has a dead car battery and can’t come on a scheduled day. (The court clerk replied, “If you need a ride call me, and I’ll send a sheriff out for you,” and added, “Usually after I say that the response is, ‘Uh, actually, my buddy’s coming for me right now.'”) Unlike me, he had had some history to discuss during jury questioning, something about a misdemeanor involving three unlicensed dogs.
“Did you feel like the court system treated you fairly in that situation?” the prosecuting attorney had asked.
“Oh,” said the man, “I was not the defendant in that case. I was the victim.”
After that day, as the weeks of my service went on and day in court after day in court were canceled, both my worries about missing work and my hopes for dashing jury room deliberation settled into a dull relief at not having to deal with other people’s problems.
Nonetheless, I really wouldn’t mind a congratulatory pepperoni pizza–but my supervisor’s response has left me less than hopeful: “Good luck!” he wrote.