Jury Duty
It's finally over. What a crazy three weeks this has been. It ended with my first full-fledged experience of jury duty under the new L.A. jury system.
A few years ago, California went with the "on-call" system for jury duty that a lot of other areas of the country seem to be using: you phone in every night during your week to find out if you have to show up or not. The good news is that you go in for one day, and if you don't get picked for a jury that day, you're done. The bad news is that there is no way to get out of it any more; the only other time I've been called for jury duty was in 1995, and I showed up and explained that I was an MD and my patients would suffer if I wasn't there, and was dismissed. Not any more! No excuses are accepted, it seems.
Monday I got lucky and didn't have to go in at all. Cockily, I phoned in Monday evening for Tuesday convinced that I was golden, only to find that I was not so lucky. I was assigned to the downtown court on Hill Street and had to report at 7:30 am. So, off I went. I had heard that the downtown traffic sucks early in the morning, so left early. I found the assigned parking lot without any trouble, made it through the weapons check at the building entrance, and arrived in the jury call room on the second floor.
What is jury duty like? It's a lot like waiting at the airport, only you never go anywhere.
First we had to hand in our paperwork and listen to a series of instructions from the woman who was in charge, then we had to watch a video narrated by one of the judges about why jury duty is important and how it's SO GREAT that we showed up to perform our CIVIC DUTY, etc. etc. The judge quotes Thomas Jefferson on the subject of trial by jury: that the right to trial by jury is more important than the right to vote. I query this, but decide that after decades of summary trials under British rule I might have felt the same way.
"We know that you didn't volunteer for this," says the judge on the video, drawing a bitter laugh from his captive audience.
Then we sit. And sit. I have brought reading material, but find myself dozing off. I trade comments with the guy sitting next to me. I am pleasantly surprised to find that a) I'm not surrounded by weirdos, and b) on jury duty we're all equal and everyone is called. I see all ages from Generation X'ers to people in their seventies; I see black, white, Hispanic and Asian. Every once in awhile the Mistress of Ceremonies calls off a list of names; people come forward and are sent up to one courtroom or another.
Finally it's my turn. We go up to Courtroom 73, and after a brief delay because one of our jurors speaks no English (he's Armenian and his nephew came to translate for him), we are escorted into the courtroom.
posted by Dr. Alice at #
