Jury Duty

Last week I received a letter in the mail that said I had been summoned for jury duty.  Now, mind you, this is like the third time in four years.  The first time it was cancelled, and the second time I had a connection and someone got it postponed/excused for me.  This time I had no way out...  I called Friday after 5:00 and sure enough it hadn't been cancelled.

I'm not going to go through the entire process, so I'll hit on some highlights or some things I found interesting.  The District Clerk said that they had summoned 300 people, and the final count was about 70 people.  Then she also said that they were picking only one jury today.  Really?  I didn't know they could pick more than one!  I was juror number 98 but ended up sitting in spot 25 because so few people showed up.  Thankfully, the attorneys wanted to do a jury shuffle so I ended up as juror number thirty-four.

The whole process wasn't horrible, but I did get really tired of just sitting there by noon.  I was ready for a recess longer than 10 minutes, and I was hungry for some lunch.  Thankfully we finished around 1:15pm.  I did not get selected (barely), and I don't know if I could have sat there any longer without any food.  Juror number 32 ended up being the alternate.  So, I was two away from being selected - whew!  I think I would like to actually sit on the jury at some point in my life, but today was not the day.  My students need me more than the court system does right now.

The way people dressed surprised me, but at the same time didn't.  You had a few people like me who dressed professionally, you had the hard-working middle class men who dressed in their boots and starched jeans, and then you had the people who looked like they just walked off the street and ended up in the court room.  Personalities were interesting too.  You had the obnoxious young kid who complained about everything at every chance he got, and you had the redneck woman who could have been mistaken for a man and she seemed to know everyone in the courtroom.

Overall, good experience.  The whole process was very interesting.  My butt got really sore from sitting so long.  Definitely worth getting out of work for.  Andy would have been absolutely miserable because he couldn't sit still for that long.  He gets way too antsy too quickly.