The last time I was summonsed to jury duty was about a week before the pandemic hit. Though my colleagues at work expressed doubt that it would actually happen in light of the lockdown, this is not the kind of luck I generally have, so I made my plans to go and dutifully checked in the night before fully expecting my desire to get out of jury duty to be trumped by my okayness with being in lockdown-- but wouldn't you know for once the universe granted me a break and cancelled my jury duty.
My karma with jury duty is a bit more anomalous -- and weird-- than it is with everything else in my life. The prior time I reported to jury duty was the day that Beto O'Rourke announced his candidacy for Senate against Ted Cruz in 2018; I got dismissed early due to a continuance in the trial I was waiting to be selected for. The prior time, after being rejected for one jury, I learned that my wife, who had been forced to take public transportation because of my extraordinary need for the car, had stepped into a pothole, fallen and broken her ankle on the way to the bus stop so I got dismissed from jury obligations for the rest of the day to attend to her. In short, jury duty has always been eventful for me but never resulted in my being selected for a trial.
That day that my wife broke her ankle-- as I sat in the voir dire dreading the interview, I thought about how my personal experience as a victim of a mugging some twenty years prior had been a sort of get out of jail free card (so to speak) in prior voir dires and searched inside my soul to interrogate myself about whether this experience had truly prejudiced me in a way that would inhibit my impartiality or prevent a fair and just hearing on my part in a criminal trial. I had healed from the trauma, and in any case, I had never generalized my feelings about crime as being that of a victim in search of vengeance from any criminal. I decided that, on the contrary, having searched the depths of my heart I had concluded that I would be able to separate my own experience from the facts of a case to such an extent that I could truthfully state that I could serve impartially. But when I had made my case to the judge for my fitness to serve, the defense attorney decided to use one of his free passes to reject me without cause. Justice's loss! But I felt I had dodged a bullet.
For this reason, I was almost certain that today was not going to be my lucky day. Even though virtual duty meant I did not have to drive an hour to the county courthouse at an ungodly hour of the morning. Even though when I got called into a voir dire for a civil case, I was given lucky 21 as my juror number out of 30 in the running for 6 juror slots plus 2 alternates. As I sat in the zoom waiting room looking at the live muted feeds of my fellow prospective jurors, I observed that one of them was actually connecting from his job behind the wheel of a delivery vehicle, while others were shuffling papers and obviously multi-tasking both jury duty and their jobs. Did they forget to get excused from work for jury duty or were their employers not compensating them for attending to their civic duty? The gods were not smiling on the prospect of me overcoming my jadedness. To pass the time I made a fateful decision to browse through my brother's twitter feed, scrolling through what was a particularly contentious morning of tweets fully emblematic of the decrepit state of our current society and particularly with respect to our judiciary and system of justice.
In the virtual jury room, the visual chaos of the muted jurors was suddenly broken by the commanding voice of a new face that materialized toward the center of things. I quickly gathered that this was the judge and that the selection process was beginning. The judge told us about the nature of the case (a civil suit between a gentleman injured in a crash and the gentleman who drove the other vehicle) and went through the initial survey of all participants. I raised my hand to the questions about law firm employment (though not as a legal worker) and medical training (sleep lab technician), but sat on my hands for the question about beliefs, opinions or other reasons that would prejudice and impair me in the performance of making a fair decision on the basis of the evidence. When the judge left the jury room, as I waited for my interview with the judge, I realized that it wasn’t my law or medical experience that made me suspect as a juror, but in fact my belief in Universal Healthcare and in the notion of restorative justice in which there aren’t winners and damages and losers and penalties but the restoration of justice between two parties in what even our language recognizes is an accident. The more I waited the more I stewed in the juices of anger that in order to get your life back after an accident this is what you have to go through. How else could you afford the rehabilitation and work loss in this rotten system than to hire a shyster lawyer to take it out of some other sucker's hide in court? That’s what prevented me from believing that I could give justice by going along with this charade.
And when I found myself suddenly virtually materialized by myself before the judge, a clerk and the two lawyers in the case, that’s what I told the judge when she questioned me. Though she begged to differ with me that the outcome of this one case had anything to do with the failures of our system of healthcare delivery and justice, she was very kind to me about my honesty in expressing my opinion (and I was not rude about it, though I did get inspiration from looking at the turkey lawyers while I was expressing myself.)
After I was dismissed, which consisted of being popped out of the virtual judge’s chambers like a cartoon character and back into the waiting area, I did not know how successfully my spiel had gone. I mean was there a chance that rather than be convinced by my self-assessment they would be so impressed by my honesty and argument that they would want me on the panel to try to enhance the possibility of actual justice happening?! But assuming it had worked, part of me thought, ok, I was clever enough and angry enough at society to perhaps get the chutzpah to make this kind of ploy, but what if everyone else had my attitude about our fucked up systems of healthcare and justice? Was it fair that I got to cleverly get out of it just because I was highly motivated to come up with such a scheme? I didn’t know!
As it turns out it worked. My number was passed by when they called the selected jurors. At the time I was proud of myself and felt I’d spoken some truth to power and perhaps maybe increased justice just a tiny bit in the world, but in retrospect I'll bet they just looked at me as one of those kooky old cranks who was better sent along back to his bat cave (and maybe have NSA check up on his surfing activities just to be on the safe side, mk?)
Whatevs am I right?? Out of it for 3 years at least they said!
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