Jury Duty

I served once on a criminal case. Defendant was looking at 10 years on a three strikes drug case in which he tried to buy a little crack or something, definitely for personal use.

I am adamantly opposed to three strikes laws and the different sentences handed to Black defendants (our guy was Black).

So I lied and said I could be impartial, but there was no way I was going to vote guilty. Plus, I had no use for the judge because I thought he was a shitty prosecutor before being elected to the bench.

In the initial jury poll, it was, like, 10-2 or 9-3 for conviction. We hashed it out and finally rejected the police video because it had some Zapruder gaps on it.

The prosecutor and police were fucking pissed when we delivered a not guilty verdict. (We were all sure he was guilty, but the video gave us just enough evidence, enough reasonable doubt, that he stayed out of jail for another day.) I would have hung the jury if the other 11 voted to convict.

So I fucked the system, a system I feel is corrupt when small-time drug deals can put you in gladiator school for 10 years. And I don’t feel bad about it at all.

Fire away.

 

I've been through a number of jury calls and never been selected. Not long after 9/11, when a few of the pool were called in for review, the judge asked if anyone had a reason for not serving. One guy said he had a close relative in law enforcement and could not be unbiased against the defendant. He was excused. I raised my hand and said I had a relative in Secret Service who had been in the WTC parking garage in '93 when the bomb went off (true), and that I was uncertain how I felt about the LE/accused relationship. I added that my relative had once played old surveillance tapes for us, for the comic value. The judge said that was wrong, and excused me anyway.

 

I've gotten summoned a few times, but only had to report to the courthouse thrice.
First time was when I was in college and home for the summer. Started through jury selection, and the judge let me go when I said I was a college student who had just started a summer job and might lose it if I took a week off for jury duty.
After getting dismissed around lunchtime and not having to return, I went out in the afternoon and found a different job.

Second time, I went through selection on a manslaughter/murder trial but wasn't picked. The defendant was DUI while boating on a reservoir, rammed into someone and killed them. I remember thinking his lawyer didn't seem very good, and sure enough the guy was convicted. As a bonus, going through jury selection helped me point out a typo in our paper. We ran a brief on the case following the conviction, and I noticed they had either his hometown or the location of the incident wrong.

Third time was the charm. I got seated on an eminent domain case where the DOT was doing a highway widening project and a restaurant owner was haggling for more money for the building and land they needed. Toward the end of the second or third day they abruptly called a recess, and the judge called us back in about 30 minutes later to say they had settled.
In those two days, when I wasn't fighting with every ounce of my being to keep my eyes open, I learned more about our county's zoning laws and parking lot engineering than I ever thought possible.

 

One of the cases I got dismissed from in federal court was a your stereotypical, fat, uneducated, hillbilly woman suing Walmart because she slipped and fell in the store.
I can't remember word for word what I said (been too long) when the judge asked if anyone had an opinion on personal injury suits, but it started something like this:
"In today's litigious society, we have far too many individuals seeking pecuniary compensation from multinational corporations..."

Annnnnnd that's when I was free to go about my day.

 

I would like to be seated on a jury for a criminal case, and have had several opportunities.

I seem to get summoned every single year. Not kidding. I think I've been summoned each of the past 10 years running, including just last month. (Fortunately, in my area, you're only on-call for a week, and if you actually get summoned to the courthouse, the commitment is only for either one day, or one trial).

I almost always have gotten as far as being called up to a courtroom to begin jury selection. But I never get kept on. Sometimes, I've been happy about that; other times, I've been disappointed. But one attorney or the other always excuses me.

For a long time, I thought it was because I was a reporter and I'd heard that lawyers don't like to have reporters on the jury, precisely because they can usually think well, think for themselves, and not be unduly swayed by much -- that they have an ability to be too even-handed. The past couple years, though, I've gone the other way, and thought I've been dismissed because of speaking too strongly, with some opinion thrown in, in answer to some of their queries as they worked their way through potential jurors.

 

Got called for duty a couple years ago on a local county case.
As an avid reader, I already had my book (Aztec by Gary Jennings) in tow.
Jury selection lasted the morning of the first day. I was the third person chosen for the process and the first guy, so I had pretty good idea I would make the final cut. I did, despite the fact I told them during questioning that when I was married years earlier, my wife was held up at gunpoint (the guy had also kidnapped his friend and stolen his friend's car; he was later caught and took a plea deal).
The trial involved alleged trespassing/attempted trespassing. It lasted the afternoon of the first day and morning of the second day. Only got a free lunch the second day.
The court also confiscated our phones, so the book came in REALLY handy.
We found the guy guilty of attempted trespassing since he never actually entered the building. Found out after the trial he was an habitual petty criminal who had a few jail stints already to his credit.

 

LOL. That's almost exactly what happened to me last year!

I was being considered for a case involving a drunk driver that was pretty high-profile at the time it occurred. Well, the drunk driver and two others in his car, IIRC, were killed in the accident that occurred. But the drunk driver's family was suing a construction company for big money because they claimed that some heavy machinery that had been parked on the side of the road had actually caused the crash.

I let it be known that I thought the whole thing seemed rather distasteful, and felt like blood money, and how could the drunk driver's family do it?, etc...I was promptly excused.

 

Hampton Sides’ book Hellhound on His Trail, about the search for MLK’s killer, got me through jury duty a few years ago. We had a lot of down time.

I was called for jury duty this week but didn’t get chosen, but it did give me a reason to skip a work Christmas party that I didn’t want to attend anyway.

 

My whole fuckin life I've been chasing the high of a 1980s last day of school, but the day I was released from it was a happy time. A get-thee-to-the-bar kind of happy day.

 

He was not negligent.

 

Never been called, don’t know if I ever will be. I’d prefer not to do it, but if I ever get called I’m not going to try and get out of it. And I will probably piss off my fellow jurors because I’m going to take my time to actually go over everything and not crank out something in 30 minutes or less like I’m delivering a pizza.