Jury Duty

About a month ago I got a summons in the mail for jury duty. There were two pieces of paper you had to fill out. They asked you to fill out your name and address and race, etc., and then another one asked you if you or anyone you know is a lawyer, if you've ever been convicted of a crime, etc etc. So I filled them both out and my dad forgot to send one. Fortunately I didn't get in trouble. The piece of paper, from what I thought, said to call on July 23rd to see if you'd need to come the next day. On the 22nd, my dad came up to me and asked me if I had called. I told him that no, I hadn't, I needed to call the next day. He asked if I was positive, and I said I'd bet my life on it. "I wouldn't do that again, " he said, and then showed me the paper which said I needed to call on the 22nd.

So I called the number and a recording of a girl's voice said that jurors of all type needed to come in that day (I was a "Standby" juror).

The next day I was going to wake up at 8AM so I could drive to Media in time, but my dad woke me up at 7:55 somewhat hurriedly asking, "Are you getting up now? You have to go to Media." And I said, I know, I was going to wake up at eight. But he said that I had to take a shower and shave. It made me sad when he said I had to shave because I had a lot of facial hair at that point and I HATE shaving and it takes a long time, but he said, "Look, I know everyone there and they know who I am and I can't have my son walking around that building with a tshirt and scruffy." I got up then and ate my cereal (Cinnamon Life, which my mom accidentally bought instead of regular Life) and while I was eating it, my alarm started going off. I thought about going upstairs to turn it off, but I just let it ring figuring I'd turn it off when I went back upstairs for the bathroom. No one even said anything about it, so I think I was the only one that noticed.

I took a shower and shaved (shove? ...). As usual I cut myself and didn't do a very good job. My hair is white in some parts and you can't see it at all when it's wet, so I never find out how terrible a job I did until it dries. Some of my hair goes up and basically over/around my cheek bones. It makes me look like a caveman and I forgot to get some of that. So I had to go to court as dad's caveman son.

It was really easy to drive there. I thought about The Morning Commute while I was driving and concluded that the drive from here to Media isn't that bad. It was about 25 minutes, which is a great amount of NPR's Morning Edition to listen to. Hopefully my commute will be something like that long, if I have to commute. When I got there, a cop was standing on the street and I showed him my jury summons and he let me into the parking lot for free.

For some reason I parked on the top level of the lot even though I think there were spots open in the bottom level. I walked down and walked over to the front steps of the courthouse. The courthouse was way bigger and more grandiose-looking than I remembered/expected. Big pillars and columns and everything. I walked in and there were two lines for security, so I put my stuff through and saw a woman with a red pin that said "JUROR" in white and thought, Wow, this woman is really into being a juror. After I got my stuff back I asked a cop where the jurors were supposed to go and he pointed me to the jury lounge, which was down the hall and to the left. There were two signs for it (oops). When I walked in the first thing they did was give me a red button that said JUROR in white, and then I felt stupid for thinking that other woman was a loser. They also gave me a clipboard with a lot of papers on it and told me to NOT fill out the survey until we watched an instructional video on how to fill it out.

The jury lounge was pretty big. When you walked in there was an "office" for the selection workers, and then it opened up to a large floor of chairs. It probably went back 20 rows and was about 15 wide, with aisles on the right side and in the middle toward the left. The chairs were red with gold buttons on it or whatever you call them and were all free-standing so you could move it if you wanted to bad enough, but they were very organized in rows and columns so no one would think to do that. The chairs had a rounded back and a sort of puffy bottom and were made of either leather or pleather. I picked a chair that was next to a seat where the person had gotten up to go to the bathroom, figuring it was much less awkward than taking the seat beside her when she was actually there. When she got back she took her coffee and moved it over, taking the seat two away from me instead of the one right next to me.

The seats were very, very uncomfortable. I tried to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an Indian history of the United States, but finding a comfortable position in which to read was so difficult that I couldn't read the book for nearly as long as I wanted to be able to. I think it was the rounded back that made it so terrible. It was very rounded. I tried hunching over away from the back, and leaning to the sides, and putting my foot up, and putting my foot under me, but in all cases my back started to hurt/get really uncomfortable, so after a while I'd have to stand up or something like that to make it hurt less. All in all, though, I did get about 70 pages into the book.

When we first got there, a younger, heavy blonde woman moved a podium with a microphone to the front of the room and started talking to us all. I forget what she said, but she read from a script and didn't seem to be enjoying it at all. It was just some welcome speech. After she finished the script she just started talking and seemed a lot more natural, but still like she hated her job. After that she introduced a judge who came to speak to us and remind us that what we were doing was very fulfilling and our duty and necessary and gratifying and important and things like that. After that I think we took a break because we were all exhausted.

They told us to take the elevator downstairs, but I didn't want to wait for 30 elevator loads so I started looking for stairs. After looking over the entire floor, I found no stairs that I could access, so I had to go to the elevator. We were headed to the cafeteria, which I then found, but all the dougnuts had been eaten. So I got some Tastykake doughnuts which I suppose were just as good.

When we went back up we watched the instructional video on filling out that survey. It asked, again, if you were an eyewitness to a crime, if you committed a crime, if you or someone in your family was a lawyer, etc. The video was about 30 minutes long, which I think was a little overkill for 16 yes or no questions.

We were all probably hoping that a judge would come early in the morning to strike a jury so that we could get out of there - there were only two judges waiting so if it happened quickly for both of them, we'd be done in an hour - but none came. At 11:35, the blonde lady said we were on lunch until 2. TWO AND A HALF HOUR LUNCH BREAK. Seriously? Do all judges get 2.5 hour lunches? As I was walking out of the building with everyone else, I heard a lot of them talking on their cell phones saying "I'm just going to go home!" One teenage girl wearing a gray shirt that said "FITCH" on it was talking to her dad on her cell phone and I heard: "What happens if you just don't come back? .... I'd rather just be arrested." I called dad and asked him if it was generally understood this meant you could leave, but he said no, but that I could talk to Mr. Montella and maybe he could tell me what he thought or get me off the list for the rest of the day. I went to look for him, but he was also on a 2.5 hour lunch break.

I sat outside eating my peanut butter sandwich and apple that I brought. I sat on a hard cement bench, but at one point moved to a round thing so I could lean back. I remember three black kids walked by me while I was sitting there eating. When I was done I wanted to walk around Media. I called Jenn to see if she was in Media by any chance, but she was still asleep. So I just walked around. I walked to the right first and saw the Coffee Club where I used to play, but the Planned Parenthood next to it appeared closed. I don't really remember any of the other stores down on the right, and so I turned back to go left. There were a LOT of restaurants. I passed the ice cream store I went to last summer with Chaz and Sarah with the big staircase in the front, and passed Cold Stone and thought that I saw Mr. and Mrs. Bank talking with potential buyers behind the counters.

There were also a lot of banks. There was a Trader Joe's in an old church it seemed, though maybe a barrack. There was a nice restaurant called Under the Stars. I saw the Towne Hall or whatever it was where we often have Christmas dinner, and I saw the Iron Hill Brewery where I think we went for dad's birthday this year. When I was walking I saw a store called "Deals," so I went inside. There was a woman talking to the owner, but I just looked around at the prices. Everything seemed ridiculously expensive. 4 AA batteries was 11.99, but they claimed the original price was 16.29. As a Walgreen's employee, I can tell you that is not the truth. That is not a deal at all.

There was another Deals store I went to further down. The first one was gray and white, but this one was large and open and brown and dark. I walked up and down all the aisles, and at one point had to walk through three older women talking. One of them had just had a stroke two weeks ago, and made a comment about quitting smoking. One of the women looked at me and said, "Hear that young man? Quit smoking!" I said, "I don't smoke, but thanks," and kept going. They were weird. The deals in this store were actually sort of deals, but they didn't have a lot. Specifically no back to school stuff. So I kept going.

After that I walked back, checked out a toy store real quick, and went back to lay on the grass in my nice collared shirt and call Gina. After a while of that I decided I was just going to go to my car and listen to NPR.

On my way over I saw a black pick-up truck parked on the sidewalk with cages in the back, and I heard a cooing/chirping noise. So I looked and I saw animals in the cages. There was a raccoon keeping himself very low and almost lunging forward. There was also a badger, I think, in a cage to his left. There was food in his cage. He was making the sad sounds. It was very very hot outside and these animals had a lot of hair and were sitting in direct sun. The badger was leaning on the side of the cage and looked very tired. There was food in his cage but I don't think he was interested. I took some pictures of them on my cell phone. When I went to the other side of the truck, I saw that there was another raccoon below the badger. At least he was in the shade...

So I moved my car to a spot on the first floor for shade, realized it was reserved, and moved it again. It was really hot (I wouldn't leave the car running with air conditioning!), so I opened the windows. Still too hot, so I unbuttoned my shirt. Still too hot, so I just took my shirt off and leaned forward. So for me, jury duty included about forty minutes of sitting in my car with my shirt off listening to economic news on NPR. Do you know what the Ted Spread is? I do. And it's very important in economics. It's basically a measure of fear regarding the economy and is usually at 50 points and hasn't gone far from that in a century. Now it's at 150.

After that I went back and tried to find Mr. Montella again, but he was still at lunch by 1:40. So I went back inside. I kept doing the security thing wrong, and the police man there said, "Dude, I don't need to x-ray your phone!" At one point he did look at my white flash drive to see what it was though. I went back and read, and at about 2:30 they said they were going to strike a jury for a criminal case, so they'd be calling 50 people I think.

They started calling in groups of five. She'd say 1, a name, 2, a name, 3, etc. She got to 45 and I still wasn't picked. 5 people left, I looked around the room, must have been like 75 people in there. So she got down to 50 and I still wasn't picked, and I thought, Whew! I could be done right now! But then she said 51, a name... and I thought, WHAT. God. 4 names left and 69 people so my chances are still like 1 in 17. Got down to two people left. 2 names and 67 people. 1 in 33 chance. 54, me. I was number 54 out of 55. Everyone gave all the terrible glory to #55 though. I think at least three people commented to him. He commented to me, "We almost made it!" He was a middle aged white guy with short blonde/brown hair and seemed nice. I saw that the man in front of me was a chemist/engineer on the survey we had to fill out earlier.

We went upstairs. The judge introduced himself and then asked us a bunch of questions after a while, which was basically the survey all over again. Only a few people stood for any of the questions, including the guy next to me who said that he might not be able to be a fair and impartial juror in this case (#55, that is). After they did the full survey, they started calling up individual jurors to the sidebar. They put on static noise throughout the court so we couldn't hear what they were saying. They started with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and we though it would take forever, but then they jumped to 9, 13, 25, 28, and then I think they were finished. A court clerk then took a paper multiple times between the defense and prosecution's attorneys, agreeing on who to pick.

The first time I saw the guy accused was when I walked into the courtroom. He was standing there with his attorney, who was young, heavy, white, and red-haired, and looked sort of dejected. He was Latino. His last name was Martinez, I think. He wore very large and very thick glasses, had short brown hair, a mustache and almost a unibrow. He was wearing a yellow shirt with some green writing near the breast pocket, probably for some club he belonged to, and khaki shorts or pants. He was accused of driving under the influence. Apparently on December 24th, 2007, there was an accident that he was involved in and the police said they smelled alcohol and arrested him for driving under the influence at 2:13PM. That was a pretty bad time to get caught for that, I suppose.

Anyway, they called the 14 jurors and I was not one of them. I had talked to the people to my right a little bit, including a very talkative black woman and a much quieter older white guy (the engineer). She was a student and adjunct professor of English at Temple, he was retired. It was nice talking to them - we talked mostly about school and the kids that she had as her interns. He spelled "crooked" as "crookted." He was an athlete, she said.

We went back down to the jury lounge, and everyone else had gone. We wondered when they had left and felt jealous. Everyone turned in their juror number which we had clipped to ourselves in the top right part of our shirts and their red juror badges, except for me because I lost mine sometime around when I took my shirt off I suppose. I'll have to look for it in my car.

Peace out.