Juror #122, come on down!

Thursday was my first day of fall break, which exists because or Yom Kippur and because my school just likes to have regular vacations. I'm not complaining. However, I did not get to take a vacation because I, for the first time ever, had to go to the courthouse for jury duty.

I showed up at 7:45a.m. for check-in, which means I had to get up just as early as if I was teaching. I brought some grading with me and worked on that while they played the orientation film. They then called out names for the first group assigned to courtrooms. The list was long and probably about 1/3 of the several hundred people were called and left the room.

I was on the pre-selected list, so I had been assigned to a specific case. Jury selection started at 10:30, so myself and about 70 others went up to a courtroom. What followed was mind-numbing boredom. After taking role and assigning us our juror numbers they randomly called 12 people up to the jury box. The judge then gave them instructions and allowed them to give a brief work and prior jury service bio. The rest of us were instructed to sit quietly and listen because as jurors were dismissed the replacements would be responsible for the information that had already been presented. By then it was lunch time, which was 90 minutes long. When we returned the attorneys began questioning prospective jurors. The attorneys were then able to take turns dismissing jurors without giving cause and the process repeated as new ones were called up. After 90 minutes of this we got another short break. By this time they had about finished with jury selection.

After returning from break they finally finished the selection process and about 1/2 of the remaining people in the pool were dismissed to return to the main waiting room for another possible assignment. They then repeated the process to select three alternates.

The entire thing was extremely boring as it consisted of sitting quietly, doing nothing but listening to very boring exchanges, for several hours. Amazingly, I did not fall asleep.

Luckily, my name was never called. I wouldn't normally mind serving, but this was an estimated 16 day case, meaning I would have been out of school for the rest of the month. Not good. The case involved an alleged gang member involved in a gun buy that went bad when Anaheim cops showed up. Gunfire was apparently exchanged, with a cop being wounded. The defendant was in a wheelchair, which I am assuming was a result of the gunfire exchange.

The most interesting part was the way questions were asked. Both attorneys and the judge framed questions in a way that didn't allow people to expound on personal situations that they felt disqualified them for service. They also asked questions in a manner gauged to elicit a specific response, where to answer in the opposite was would make the respondent look like an idiot, unreasonable, bigoted, or possessing some other negative character trait. An example would be something like, "Now you wouldn't believe the word of a police officer over that of a defendant just because he's a police officer. You are a reasonable person who would consider just the evidence presented to you in this courtroom in making a judgment as to the reliability of a witnesses testimony, wouldn't you?" The problem is that most of us are inclined to believe the word of a police officer over that of a defendant, not because they are always truthful, but because their motivation for lying is usually much less suspect. A cop stands to gain little by lying, where a defendant stands to gain much. But as a potential juror you can't answer this way. You are stuck with basically answering yes, and binding yourself to considering the defendant as just as trustworthy as the cop, or answering no, and calling yourself an unreasonable person.

It reminded me of the high pressure tricks some salesmen use to sway people to their way of thinking. By drawing a false correlation between two things, one is forced to accept or deny both at the same time. "You're not going to let your wife control you and not allow you to buy this car, are you?" The entire selection process had little to do with learning about who the jurors were and more to do with making them begin to think about possible situations in a way that was advantageous to a specific side of the case. So many of the questions involved the fallibility of cops that I am almost certain that the case was going to be about he, he said between the defendant and the responding officers. Things like who shot first, was the shooting justified, is a friend of a gang member necessarily a gang member, etc.

At any rate. I am safe for at least a year.