jumperkid | Adventures in Jury Duty

So when this all began, I considered keeping a private locked running commentary and then unlocking it when I was allowed to talk about it all. I ended up not doing that and y'all should be really grateful because I completely lost the will to live about halfway through the whole thing. EMO!EG came out in force and that's really not something people need to see.

Way back on April 1, I was called in for jury selection. This is the first time this has happened. Since college, I've basically moved every two years or so, so the g-men have never been able to catch me. Until now. The selection process was fairly painless, if a bit boring. And of course, since I'm so generally mild-mannered and adorable they totally wanted me for the jury. This being my first time, the Universe clearly wanted to mark it with STYLE: the charges (among a few lesser weapons violations and such) were armed robbery and felony homicide. GOOD TIMES! The trial itself was fairly fascinating. As one of my fellow jurors said at the beginning, "It's just like being on Law & Order!" And it kind of was. There were even a few gasp-worthy moments such as when that one witness got all testy and was scolded by the judge or that other time when the defense attorney accused that other witness of secretly orchestrating the whole thing. (Which, PS would not surprise me. That guy was sketchy.) Oh! At that one time during the opening statements when that one lawyer told us one of the witnesses is an admitted liar. I don't think I've ever seen anyone move as fast as the other lawyer did to object to that little tidbit. I learned a lot about the world and myself and shotguns. (This is true. You got questions about shotguns? I GOT ANSWERS!) I also learned a fair amount about possible gang feuds, but I'm not going to talk about that because I'd prefer to not get shot. Expert witnesses are totally where it's at. It was like Show and Tell with grievous bodily harm. I did feel a little bad at one point because the make-up artist in me was all, "Oooooooh! So that's what gunpowder stippling should look like! AWESOME." But all in all, educational fun times. So the trial itself was pretty interesting. Deliberation on the other hand is fascinating but in a seriously hellish kind of way. The first four days or so were fun enough. We sifted through the evidence and went over our notes and discussed the case. It's really interesting to have a group of people who all watched the same thing and see how each person interprets what happened. But we were split: 9 to 3. It became pretty clear that there were some people (on both sides) that had made up their minds and no amount of discussion would budge them. So then it turned into five days of the same argument over and over. We sent a couple of notes to the judge to explain where we were in the process and FINALLY, he conceded that we were deadlocked. After he called it, the jury got to talk to the lawyers for a bit, which was really nice. We got to tell them about why we were stuck and answer a few questions for them. One of the lawyers told us that there IS more to the story than they were able to get across in court, which made me feel slightly less of a failure, so that was nice. But nicest of all is being DONE.