I, the Jury

An essay about doing your civic duty no matter how reluctant you are to do it...

Just in case you don’t already know, I, the Jury was Mickey Spillane’s first novel starring Mike Hammer which came out in 1947 and they made a movie of it in 1953 and again in 1982 because Hollywood ran out of new ideas sometime after making Jaws in 1975 and if that seems like an exaggeration, they’re still remaking Jaws and this year they released Under Paris about a giant shark with a shitty sense of direction who winds up in the Seine River and threatens a triathlon, which is a ludicrous scenario because as those of us who watched the Summer Olympics already know, triathlons taking place in the Seine River are actually threatened by all the human poop Parisians dump in it.

But they didn’t make that movie after taking a look at the proposed movie posters and I guess I’m thinking along these lines because I almost named this essay Jury Doody, but then figured I’d already supplied my critics with enough evidence that I can’t resist sophomoric puns although I’ve somehow managed to work that one into this article.

Moving on and not a moment too soon…

Those of you paying attention (a group I’m seldom part of) may have noticed I posted a piece called “The Reluctant Juror” last week and then took it back down and that’s because I not only got summoned for jury duty, I got picked to be on a jury and the judge warned us not to talk about our experiences until the trial was over.

While I didn’t think “The Reluctant Juror” crossed the line – I made fun of lawyers, jurors, the United States Justice system in general, but nothing about a specific case – I figured why take a chance of screwing things up for everybody else involved and the judge made it clear if we didn’t follow the rules we could cause a mistrial and it would go on our permanent record and we would not be allowed to participate in after-school activities or attend Junior Prom assuming we could find someone willing to go with us after proving ourselves weak-willed blabbermouths.

And now that the trial’s over I still don’t want to screw things up so I’m only going to talk about jury duty in general and not reveal much about the trial although I will tell you the absolute most difficult thing about being a juror is staying awake and waiting for bathroom breaks, although the second problem tends to help out with the first one.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s go back to the beginning.

Showing Up

When I originally got the summons they wanted me to show up five days before my mom’s 99^th birthday when I was planning on being in California so I got a postponement, but you can only get one of those which is probably a good policy because otherwise I’d just keep getting postponements until I turned 75 because that’s the age when you no longer have to serve on juries, so if you’ve got a grumpy-old-pain-in-the-ass relative that you don’t want to deal with, rest assured the U.S. Justice System totally agrees with you.   

If you live in Jackson County, Missouri and get called for jury duty you’ll either be required to show up at the Independence courthouse or the Downtown courthouse and I got the Downtown courthouse and getting downtown is currently a mess because they’ve decided to rip up a bunch of streets to build a trolley system to replace the trolley system they already had, but decided they no longer needed back in 1957.

And the same group of geniuses who decided trolleys were clearly a thing of the past because everyone would much rather ride on buses with semi-crazy people who smell like urine, recently decided to raise parking prices to $30 to $40 if there was an “event” nearby which makes me wonder what qualifies as an “event” and why anyone would go downtown if there wasn’t one.

The court also tells you to check their website an hour before you’re supposed to show up at 8AM to see if your summons has been cancelled (it wasn’t) so now I had an hour to get downtown using an uncertain route and find a parking spot in a lot being run by the Kansas City Chapter of the Barbary Pirates and if you’re late for jury duty I’m pretty sure you can be charged with contempt of court which I’d already demonstrated in “The Reluctant Juror” essay, so I said screw all that and Ubered.

Which turned out to be an excellent way to see the outskirts of St. Joseph, Missouri because the Uber drivers followed the directions being offered on their phones and took convoluted routes to get downtown that involved parts of the city I was previously unaware of, even though I live a few block from a street that eventually goes directly by the courthouse.

$27.42 to get there and $42.84 to get home because the second ride was at 5 PM when way too many people want Uber rides and if I recall correctly the court pays you $12 for parking and 7 cents a mile for travel so by my calculations I was down $56.86 before the day got started.

Getting Selected

So next you go into a big room filled with other unlucky people and the people in charge semi-apologize for asking you to show up and tell you that you’ll get paid $6 for being there and $18 a day if you get picked for a jury and point out that they don’t set those rates, they’re set by the state legislature and the legislature set them 50 years ago and according to an article I found on the internet the only state in the Union that pays jurors less is Mississippi.

And anytime your state and Mississippi turn up in the same sentence, it’s probably not a good thing and come to think of it $6 wasn’t all that much money in 1974 either.

Then they show you a video starring some local TV personality whose name has faded into obscurity and George Brett and former Kansas City Star columnist Charles Gusewelle (who died in 2016 so they need a new video) and they all tell you how important jury duty is, which makes you wonder if it’s so damn important why the cheap bastards in the legislature who got their latest pay raise just last year, give you just six bucks for participating.

And if the people around me were any indication the main purpose the video served was allowing drowsy people to catch up on their sleep.   

Next, they give you a number and mine was seven and if I had understood how jury selection actually worked I would have known I was already screwed.

Different groups were sent to different courtrooms and if I recall correctly my group had 55 people in it, so I’m liking my odds because they needed 12 jurors and 43 people would get to go home and there were two things wrong with my reasoning:

They needed 12 jurors and two alternates in case one of the first 12 decides to jump off the Jackson County Courthouse mid-trial, so that’s actually 14 people and after questioning of the potential jurors, which is called “voir dire” (French for “How crazy do I have to act to be excused?”) they didn’t look at all 55 people and then pick 14.

They actually start at number 1 and if he or she was acceptable they had their first juror and then went to number 2 and worked their way down the list, so being number 7, I was sure to get looked at and once they had 14 people they stopped looking which actually makes a lot of sense…unfortunately.

The Trial Starts

As you may have already heard, lawyers get paid by the hour so law schools produce some really really verbose people and they’d introduce an expert witness and spend the first 10-to-15 minutes establishing the expert’s credentials which meant jackshit to us jurors because we figured if you say you have a medical degree and you don’t have a medical degree,maybe the opposition lawyer will point that out, so let’s all agree you do have a medical degree or you wouldn’t be here:

Now cut to the chase and tell us what’s on your mind.

Some of the medical experts couldn’t be there in person so they testified by video and they turned out the courtroom lights and showed us things like a recorded deposition about bladder function that could make Beetlejuice drowsy and before long your eyelids start to weigh 50 pounds each, so in my case I started fidgeting around to stay awake because lawyers have tried to get mistrials over sleeping jurors. In our first break, I suggested we look out for each other and if the juror next to you started to nod off, act like you’re Travis Kelce trying to get separation from a free safety and give ‘em an elbow.

Just in case you’re a lawyer looking for a mistrial, nobody actually fell asleep, but for the kind of money you’re making you could at least try to be entertaining. Learn some card tricks or buy a joke book and every once in a while start an opening statement with:

“An astronaut, a rabbi and Kamala Harris walk into a bar.”

That was the first day, but the second day we finally had some drama – you said this in your deposition, now you’re saying something else – and they gave us notebooks for taking notes and at one point, being under the misimpression someone from the court would read our notes after the trial, I wrote:

“IF YOU’RE INTERESTING, WE’LL STAY AWAKE.”

Turns outs they destroy the notes without reading them, so future jurors, I tried to help you out, but apparently you’re on your own and I’d suggest investing in NoDoz.  

Deliberations

So finally everyone had their say and the jurors could then talk about the case and as you may have already deduced, the case involved medical experts and I opened deliberations up by saying: “How crazy is it that surgeons and orthopedists and urologists can’t agree on a medical diagnosis so they turn it over to a bus driver, a teacher and a political cartoonist to make a decision?”

But after some arguing back and forth (and some people who differed from what I originally thought made good arguments and swayed my thinking) we did reach a decision and whatever flaws our system has – and it’s got a few – that is the system we have and afterwards, the judge came up to the jury room to thank us and said something interesting:

The judge – who seemed like a good guy – wished he had a Polaroid of our faces when we got picked to be on the jury and another Polaroid of how our happy faces looked now, which was a nice thought, but I was thinking you could get the same before and after pictures from people who visit the dentist.

Nevertheless…

As Mark Twain supposedly said: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

And I feel pretty much the same way about jury duty: I didn’t want to go through it, but I’m glad I went through it, mostly because it means they can’t ask me to do it again for the next three years.

Good luck to the rest of you.