If your parents ever told you that back-talk and that bad attitude of yours were never going to get you anywhere, I need you to know right here and now that they were lying to you. They WILL get you somewhere, and somewhere is "excused from jury duty."
Allow me to explain.
Back in September, right around the time that I got approved to receive unemployment benefits -- methinks this may be no coincidence -- I got my first jury summons in the mail. Yay! Do they make greeting cards for that? Heard you might be sequestered. All our best for your time away.
When I went downtown for the cattle call to select the actual week I would serve, I chose the one farthest away because it was literally the only one during which I had not already planned 27 meetings, three lunches, two television bookings and an after-work cocktail. That week arrived on October 31, and when I headed downtown to meet my fate I was terrified.
What was I going to do if I had to sit in that room for five days? Or even worse, if I were sequestered? There are no vacation days when you are the company. If you don't work, you don't get paid. And if you're not available to work, you lose clients. It's just that simple.
But then I sat in the big ass jury room for a good three hours listening to the longest, most unnecessarily enthusiastic and pro-America speech of my life. And in that speech I was told that, probably? I had nothing to worry about. Probably I was going home by tomorrow. Probably I would sit in this very room and work on my laptop at a table they would provide for me and probably I would go home at the end of the day and probably never come back.
And maybe that was true for some of those people. For many of them. They are PROBABLY also the same people who get pulled over for speeding or weaving or running a red light and get let off with a warning. Yes. Those people are in Narnia. And they are not real.
No, I left all the PROBABLY people around 11 a.m. when my name was in the very first batch to be called for a jury. And at around 1 p.m. when we returned from our lunch recess to learn that we were walking into a sequestered second degree murder trial? Well I probably shouldn't repeat the string of choice expletives that came right out of my mouth. (Under my breath, of course. Court is scary.)
I honestly never had a clear plan for what I was going to do to attempt to get out of it, because really I figured I was screwed and that, like a hiker dying of hypothermia on Everest, I should just give in to the warmth and just let it happen. I knew that no excuse I had was good enough reason to be excused, so I didn't even try. I wasn't about to lie, or even exaggerate. I've seen enough of my murder stories to know how this whole thing works. I was stuck.
So when I was in the first batch of us to get called up for juror selection questioning, I gathered my things and went to my seat on the back row. There was no fighting it now. And since I'd woken up that morning feeling like I was coming down with a cold, I just didn't have the energy.
First, the prosecuting attorney talked to us for a while. She seemed sharp. She asked us all a few questions and then singled out some specific folks for more questions. When she finished the judge turned things over to the defense attorney. And he was, in a word, a dilbert.
He spent a good 25 minutes telling needlessly elementary allegorical stories about shopping trips to Target for dog food and baby diapers that ended with him asking every single person -- all 18 of us being questioned at the time -- the exact same effing question to arrive at the moral of his story. "Now tell me, Mrs. Smith: do YOU think that's right? And what about you, Mr. Jones? What do you think? Is that right?" Multiply that by nine and you tell me you wouldn't be looking for an exit strategy.
And the truth is, I never intended to do what happened next. It's just that this guy was just about incompetent. And he was talking to us as though we were his kindergarten class and he was trying to teach us the basic principles of the justice system. And hey, maybe that's a thing. Maybe that's what lawyers DO. But it was driving me nuts. And finally, my inability to suffer fools gladly crept up so high that it just jumped right out of my mouth.
He'd just wrapped up some ridiculous story about two kids in a room with a baseball bat and a broken television and how it illustrates our inability to see people as not guilty until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And y'all, I just couldn't help myself. So I raised my hand.
"Wouldn't you say that two kids with a baseball bat in a closed room with a broken television set constitutes reasonable doubt?" I said. He blinked, and looked confused.
I repeated myself. HE REPEATED HIS ENTIRE STORY.
I explained to him that it did not, in fact, illustrate anything about the presumption of guilt.
He blinked. And then simply went right on with his next allegory.
Just a few minutes later, the attorneys gave the judge their list of jurors they'd like excused. And whose name do you think was on that list? Why, yours truly. And when I walked out of the court room with the three others who were excused alongside me, the bailiff opened the door for us and said, "See you in 10 years! Y'all are free to go home."
And I was thankful for my smart mouth all the way back to my office where I still had time to do three hours of work before that night's yoga class.
cheers,
elizabeth
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