juror #1
february 06, 2006
someone told me once that if i get called to jury duty, to make sure i bring books like forensics and all-things-csi-like to court with me. this person said that they usually never choose people who are very interested in law/forensics etc on the jury panel. they are typically dissuaded by the attoneys to select them for being too insightful and having predispositioned opinions.
so where do i end up?
juror #1. i can't say anymore as i'm still on the case.
but i do want to talk about just the jury duty assembly room process. for those of you who have been lucky enough to be called to jury duty, you know the drill. you call in the night before and find out you have to report to your pre-assigned courthouse. then you arrive around 7:30am the next morning at some marble-like slab of a courthouse that takes all 200+ of you into one big room. then you go through the instructions of filling out your paperwork and then handing it in one cattle call at a time. there is of course a 20 minute movie to entertain you but it's a lot of people and you're cramped and packed in there....and you really just want to get the hell out.
but it's not the mundane-ness of the drill or that i will be potentially called as a juror that gets to me. no...it's the type of people you encounter that are there. it's amazing to see how ignorant and stupid some people are. they simply DO NOT listen to directions and then always ask questions later. if they would have listened, they would already know what to do. then there are those who just asks questions that DO NOT MAKE SENSE! there was this one lady with 5 chins yesterday who thought she was discriminated against because she was called in while other groups weren't called to report to duty. well, what about the other 200 of us that are sitting there NOT asking this stupid question? i felt sorry for the girl handling the briefing of the jury process as she could not understand at all what that lady was asking. the rest of us simply sighed in unison and rolled our eyes.
if it wasn't the courthouse, i think most of us would have gutted her with our folded jury duty affidavit.
needless to say, when you're in a room filled with 200 other strangers, you can't help but look around. they say that you're with strangers but i saw one of my close family friends there and hung out with him for a day and i also ran into this guy i haven't seen since high school. i'm sure there were more people i would have recognize if i really looked around but then again they may not be people i would want recognizing me. :p
currently listening to: ferry corsten, fire
