Jury Duty

So, I got called for jury duty this week. As luck would have it I was in group 3...and therefore had no chance of my number not getting called. The problem with getting called the week before Christmas is that people are apparently too busy to show up for jury duty. Apparently the threat of being hauled in to the big house is not scary enough. So, I showed up at 8am and I was not pleased because there was a lot of waiting and let's face it, I was going to make $15 dollars for the day (I make almost twice that in an hour). Frankly I just waived my big check because I figure it's my civic duty to not contribute to the State deficit. The effort to cash a $15.00 check is more burdensome than the $15.00 I gave up.

At any rate, the lack of jurors meant I still had to go through Voir Dire. Here's a hint to future criminal attorneys. I understand that people in a jury theoretically have not attended law school and do not truly know what a "burden of proof" means, or what exactly "beyond a reasonable doubt" means. But, I can tell you this, explaining reasonable doubt by pointing to the corner of a court room and asking 7 of 12 jurors to identify the object you are pointing to (which by the way was the American Flag) and then asking them how they knew...is slightly condescending. And if you are a defense attorney and you are trying to demonstrate that the burden of proof lies with the state, asking every juror whether or not you could simply sit with your defendant and not doing anything was ok probably is not going to make you a favorite. Cockiness may have served you in law school, and had you chosen corporate law or high profile criminals it might still be serving you, but I wouldn't shove your ego down a potential jurors throat.

Basically, the experience reaffirmed my conviction to never set foot in a court room again. Needless to say I was dismissed. But, they wouldn't let us leave because other courts didn't have enough jurors. After most of the day was gone, they finally let me leave at which point I decided to do all things unpleasant in the same day and drove to the BMV. What sucks even more than going to the BMV is when you get all the way there to find out that they are not open on Mondays.

So, the good news. I had to report to jury duty on Monday and I was there a vast majority of the day in which I missed the opportunity to make money at work. BUT, in the off chance that I would have been picked, all of the cases that day were criminal and scheduled to last at the least through Tuesday. However, in addition to being lucky enough to not have to come back on Tuesday I was also lucky to be called Monday and not Tuesday. Why? Well because on Tuesday the City-County building evacuated 8000 people for 3 hours into sub-20 degree temperatures for a bomb threat. So, the way I see it, it could have been much worse.