I was horrified when my roommate brought up the mail and my jury summons was inside. I love my desk job with its endless supply of Internet and bathroom breaks, and I hate any sort of disruption to my daily routine that doesn’t include a couch and some HBO. “How could this happen to ME?” I kept asking. My annoyance was alleviated a bit when I remembered that the courthouses are just a few blocks from my apartment and that there’s a combination Pizza Hut/Tim Hortons across from one of them (what?), but I still had fears of being placed in a criminal trial and having threats to my life made by mob bosses.
On Thursday morning, a couple hundred of us were seated in an auditorium with floral-fabric-covered seats spaced farther apart than any I’ve ever seen in cramped NYC. We were shown a video starring Diane Sawyer that started with a series of New Yorkers talking about how annoyed they also were at getting summoned for jury duty, but it then went on to talk about medieval punishments for crimes, how lucky we are to have the modern court system, how valuable it is to have a group of people deciding your fate versus just one judge, and how “Law & Order” ain’t real life. At the end, the video showed different New Yorkers talking about how jury duty isn’t so bad and how they’re proud to participate in a system they believe in. My heart surged with municipal pride. I started thinking, “If I had to go to court, I wouldn’t want my life in the hands of a single judge. I can convict some perp AND walk home to take a crap at lunch! This is awesome!”
But about ten seconds later, I remembered that everyone else in NYC is an idiot. The clerk who was giving directions to us on how to fill out our summons (which had directions on it already and was to be filled out prior to arrival) said that anyone whose summons wasn’t dated January 17th should come to the podium. A line of at least twenty people formed. Exactly two of them actually did have different dates on them, and then eeeeeeeeeeveryone else was sent back to their seats with their appropriately-dated summons. “Well, this is going to be a long day,” the clerk said.
It went like that all morning, with people either not listening or not reading and then throwing hissy fits and stomping back to their seats when the clerk had to point out this or that to them. I’m generally annoyed at myself for my overly-prepared, overly-concerned nature, but you can bet I had read the rules on my summons enough to have brought my kid’s birth certificate with me had I been trying to use my status as a caretaker to get out of serving my time. The worst part was the guy next to me who had come in late and was unknowingly complaining about the exact same things the people at the start of the video had been. Like, “why should I be allowed to judge someone else?” and “why don’t they just let a judge decide the cases?” He kept muttering under his breath about what a waste of time it was and was making me feel stupid for laughing at all of the clerk’s jokes while he sat there moping.
Luckily, my name was called as soon as the clerk finished, and I was put in a room with nineteen other people to be questioned about a particular case to see if we were unbiased enough to serve on that jury. It happened to be a personal injury case I was suuuuuuper interested in because I already blog about the topic, but I wasn’t called up for questioning in the first set of ten potential jurors and had to spend the day listening to the lawyers ask them one by one if they could be impartial to a person who had to speak through a translator, if they liked their jobs, if they had ever been taken to court, etc.
The whole process really appealed to my natural desire to talk about myself and impress people. After one guy in the room was asked about his regular job but then admitted that he’s really in NYC to work on his sculpture, I couldn’t wait to talk about my own art of photography and blogging. When I heard the intelligent people in the room talk about their feelings on personal injury award caps, I couldn’t wait for my turn to sound intelligent. Because of course I assume I sound intelligent.
Some of the people in the room depressed me when they didn’t know what credibility meant and asked if we could find for the defendant but still award the plaintiff money just to be nice, but one of my favourite moments was when a foreign-born woman was asked if she would have a tendency to side with the plaintiff, one of her countrymen, because of national pride. She said, “I love this country. We have the best judicial system in the world, and I’m happy to be in a place that has these laws.” And a little tear came to my eye.
In general, I was amazed at how many people there were originally from another country and spoke another language. When we were filling out our jury summons with the clerk that morning, he had asked anyone who didn’t have a basic understanding of English to come forward, and I just expected that no one would, because this is ‘MERICA, people. But a whole stream of adults had formed a line, some of them with children in tow to act as translators. I wanted to be like, “FER’NERS!”, but instead, I’d felt a sort of pride that my beloved Brooklyn is full of such diverse people. Eww, I know.
Although one of those people was a woman behind me in the security line, which never had more than a few people in it and just involved us putting our bags on a foot-long conveyor belt to be scanned and then casually walking through a metal detector. It was about the least amount of security possible next to making no effort at all, yet this woman behind me complained, “This is one step away from a cavity search!” And then I whipped out my concealed pistol and clocked her.
By noon on Friday, the lawyers had chosen their six jurors and two alternates, and I was released back into the main juror pool without ever having been questioned. On my way out, I said to one of the lawyers, “I’m sad I didn’t get chosen. I’m dying to know how this case turns out.” He looked at me like I was such a freak and said, “Oh.” And then went back to his paperwork. It felt like being in high school again, when I actually liked biology and geometry and band but learned to be cool about it so I wouldn’t be made to feel like a loser. I wanted to be like, “It’s a good thing I wasn’t chosen for the jury, jerkoff, because I’m totally biased and would’ve ruled against your client.” This was the same guy who had warned us that as jurors, we couldn’t award his client money just because we liked him. NO PROBLEM.
In summary: jury duty is nothing to be afraid of, and lawyers are all awful.
