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Jury Duty Blooooows
I’m not sure that it bears discussing, but since this is a legal site, and since I endured the misfortune of jury duty yesterday, I thought I might briefly share my experience. Mostly what I want to say is: This is the downside to voter registration, folks. No freakin’ wonder we have such a low percentage of people registered to vote in this country.
Anyway, I’m happy to report that I didn’t make it past the voir dire stage of the proceedings (voir dire being where potential jurors are questioned so the lawyers can weed out the folks they don’t like), possibly because attorneys are unlikely to choose other lawyers to serve on their juries (while I understand this is an antiquated notion, I seriously wonder how many lawyers actually do end up serving as trial jurors). [I know quite a few lawyers who made it onto juries, actually, despite being the worst kind of obnoxious attorney. —Seth] Still, if anyone wants proof of the inefficiency of our legal system, one need look no further than the jury-selection process. In the case I was assigned to, no fewer than 100 (probably more) comprised the jury pool, of which only 14 were ultimately selected to serve as jurors. At $40 a day, the court system and employers paid at least $4,000 yesterday so that 14 people could be selected for what appeared to be a very simple possession case. That doesn’t even account for administrative fees, the resources absorbed by the prosecutor’s office, and the waste of what will eventually be a three day trial, on top of the one-day voir dire proceedings. All for a possession case, and one in which a co-defendant had already pled out. That’s more than a month’s salary for a teacher, wasted because some dude was caught with drugs in his car.
I might also add that the actual jury questioning process is brutal. Two panels of 16 were questioned for around three hours each, and from those 32 people, the 14 were chosen. This meant that the other 65 or so potential jurors had to sit in a courtroom for around seven agonizing hours, watching attorneys ask banal, exceedingly tedious questions. Is it really necessary, for instance, to question a potential juror for nearly ten minutes about the fact that she had a bicycle stolen when she was a small child? And I wonder, also, are all prosecutors now required to ask potential jurors if they are familiar with HBO’s “The Wire” if a wiretap was involved in a case? And if a cousin’s brother’s cousin twice removed once did some blow, does that really affect one’s ability to weigh the evidence and assess credibility?
The short answer, of course, is probably yes. And while the process was horribly time consuming, excruciatingly dull, and ridiculously expensive, I have to admit that the two attorneys conducting the questioning did a nice job — they managed to select the 14 people, I would guess from their line of questioning, that were the least knowledgeable, least opinionated, and most easily swayed. And you know what? I probably wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, in the end, I was kind of bummed I wasn’t chosen — I would’ve lost three days of my life, but I would’ve left disgruntled, unhappy, and just a little proud to have been able to fulfill my civic duty.
Also, that dude was totally guilty — I could tell just looking at him.
