I had jury duty today. I’ve had jury duty several times and I think it’s important, generally for everyone to participate. There’s never a good time for jury duty. I have three kids and a full-time job so there is no day where the prospect of taking a whole day for something other than my own shit seems convenient. The process is not pleasant and the cases are not always easy.
The first time I had jury duty I ended up being the lead juror in a child sodomy case. You’re never ready for something like this. You go in hoping to resolve some insurance dispute, some shoplifting charge, or someone trying to beat a DUI. What I mean to say is that you hope for something simple that can be wrapped up in a day, that has less moral hazard where no one was hurt.
A man stood accused of putting his privates in a twelve-year-old’s mouth and stood trial for it. The outcome is not important, the details are actually fuzzy to me believe it or not. I do know what happened as I read the verdict to the court, “your honor we the jury have found the defendant…”.
You get it.
The implications are severe, guilty or not. If guilty, twelve people stand to condemn a person to a very long jail sentence, permanent residence on the sexual offender list, and all that entails. In this case, you live with possibly being wrong and all that weight as you go on about your life.
In the case of pronouncing someone not guilty, you have spared the accused, but if you are wrong… well the accuser and victim have no justice (if there is such a thing). You’ve let a person who has done something horrible go and what if they do it again?
It’s not an easy choice even with all the details. I remember not liking the guy’s face. He just seemed like someone I wouldn’t want to associate with. Everyone on the jury agreed on that point. But you can’t make a choice of guilty or not guilty solely on a face. I mean, at home you can, and theoretically yes, we all could have just agreed that “fuck this guy’s face he’s guilty,” but we didn’t.
And also so many people said, “well I feel it in my gut that he did it” during deliberations. But you have to have no reasonable doubt. Any doubt at all, and you’ve got to let the person go and all the possible implications that go with it.
Overall, I think this is a good thing. I mean, you hope to have an impartial jury making up a cross-section of the population who have a grey perspective on issues in case you’re ever the one being accused of something. One thing is certain, it’s hard to get twelve people to agree on anything. But you have to agree at some point. You have to compromise your thoughts, you have to write down on paper what you believe and then you have to live with it.
I don’t know why I got to be spokesperson that day and it’s certainly not the trial I would have picked but it was an important experience. I don’t know whether we were right or wrong, but we submitted our verdict and I read it.
Let me get back to my experience today though. If you’re not there every day as a part of the day-to-day of the courthouse you forget the process. At least I had, and as I said, I’ve done it several times over the years.
The courthouse in question, like many other courthouses, is monolithic. There are large pillars, high ceilings, the materials are cold and stone. The facades are austere. The whole place has a sense of reverence. Blind ladies holding scales set in stone is the mood. This is probably a good thing as you don’t want to see a picture of a bunny rabbit or something as you’re being sentenced to do a five-year stint. It’s serious because, well, it’s serious.
We, the prospective jurors arrived early in the morning and were corralled into a holding room. From the look of things, there were perhaps fifty of us in the room.
Apparently, for our district, the number of prospects needed to be increased as getting twelve people is harder than it seems. Many people shirk their jury duty, have an excuse (valid or not), or simply don’t show up. But they need more than twelve to start with, that way if someone has a specific problem or bias that becomes addressed, they can swap out for a new, random prospective juror.
They get twenty people in the courtroom and then when everyone is filtered and there are no specific issues levied from the defense or prosecution, eight people are removed and we’re left with our twelve jurors. I don’t know if this is how it works everywhere but it’s how it works where I am.
Inside the courtroom, paintings of judges adorn wood-paneled walls. The honorable Judge Bartholomew Winslow Rainsford Compdenshireleichester IV presiding or whatever.
The holding room where the initial pool of jurors was something different. It had the same cold walls and furnishings with two exceptions. I gazed around the room, silent like most of the people there, all strangers to each other. I saw two framed prints on the wall. One was the scales of justice in purple and pink floral print and the other was the same floral pattern but as a gavel.
I looked at these paintings and thought about the person who decided to spice up the joint. Was this some crude attempt to make us feel comfortable? If so, it was a failure. I have never enjoyed very much the presence of law enforcement or so much authority around me. I would rather see the turd as it is than roll it in glitter and stick a daisy in it. Almost every experience in court to me, as someone who does not work there, has not been pleasant.
I looked at these floral paintings and thought, dear god, what hellish Etsy shop endeavor did these come from. Someone is out there, making this. It is a niche market. Who else are they selling them to? Perhaps some judge’s proud auntie? Would it go next to the kitschy sign “Live, Love, Just Us” (err Justice).
These paintings were unnecessary and a blight to the institution! I will write a severely worded letter to our delegate and have this taken care of (pst, no I won’t).
The other thing I noticed as I sat there was the silence, at least at first. We sat, all quiet. All looking around, some at the awful paintings, some out the window, some at a random place on the wall or the ground. Most were trying to avoid that most awkward of moments where you make eye contact with a stranger and then have to sit for forty minutes in silence hoping they aren’t still looking at you.
Everyone evenly distributes trying to have space but as more people arrive, eventually all the seats fill up. And it was almost quiet for a full ten minutes before I heard a familiar chirping. It happened in two localized places.
“Well, I think…”
“Oh really, well did you see her…”
I couldn’t make out the whole conversations. I could make out snippets and bits of chuckling and I looked around. In true pack fashion, the old white ladies had found each other. Not all of them mind you, but enough of them. You know the ones. The ones who can’t just sit quietly. They need a little social validation. From a certain crust. They need the empty “belonging.” They need their daily dose of “Brenda/Cindy/Barb/Deb/Cath.” They didn’t have their “Brenda/Cindy/Barb/Deb/Cath” though, so they found their surrogates in the room. Come to think of it, there actually was a Barb.
And they all just chirped with each other. They were the only ones. And like in a school classroom where a lot of the kids start talking, they get louder to hear themselves, and boom the birds go chirp chirp.
And then they would quiet down again until one of them couldn’t stand the silence anymore. These ladies were busy. Opinions on everything that no one asked and again, just the utter inability to shut the fuck up for a few minutes, which is something that I pride myself in. I love being silent forever. Believe me, I know, I’m probably the problem (and I recognize the irony as writing this is definitely not shutting the fuck up). But most of the people were quiet save these two packs of ladies who found one another during this trying (court pun) time, for them.
There’s a study that was conducted in my head during this period of time that I made up just now that correlates a person’s ability to not say anything with their level of comfort. This is not the same as not being able to say anything because I think it swings the other way too. Strangers and anxiety are real. But in this circumstance, where most everyone was quiet, and no one was asking anyone to talk, in this most serious of environments, the majority of people are just fine with remaining silent and it just seems like the appropriate thing to do.
These ladies were doing a presentation, a dance with one another that I did not understand, though I had seen it before. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them brought the paintings in to “home up” the place. One of them is knitting a “and justice for all” blanket with a teddy bear or some shit right now, just as sure as I’m the kind of asshole who felt I had to go home and write this. I feel it in my bones.
One of the ladies I had seen in line in front of me as we entered the courthouse earlier. You go through a metal detector and the sheriffs that were working the entrance explain that there are no cell phones allowed unless you are authorized. I knew this from my prior experience so I had left mine in my car. Most people also knew this. A few people sighed and left to bring their phones to their cars.
But this one lady, one of the chirpers asked with a dull dead look in her eyes, “well can’t I just keep mine?”
So, I pulled her to the side and I said, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot that you’re special.” So I grabbed her by the arm and I took her around the metal detector and I tapped the sheriff on the shoulder and I said, “don’t worry, I’m with Cindy here, and she’s allowed to have this phone” and the sheriff waved us on because they had forgotten also, that Cindy is fucking special.
Only that’s not what happened obviously and she chirped some stream of complaints as she left to go place her phone in her car. This was pre-evidence that she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut.
That’s where my observations end for the day. I can’t really talk about a trial in progress. Maybe one day I’ll write about that. What I do know is that I am possibly missing opportunities left and right. Perhaps I will open an Etsy shop for welcome mats that say “My cousin is a judge,” or some such thing.