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Adventure in the courthouse
So, as things turned out, the lad was not seated on a jury today and he is excused from jury duty for at least another three years. He is very, very happy about that. Indeed, it was a close shave. There were three trials about to happen and he was in the process of being interviewed and appraised for the first one. It was a murder trial which, they told him, would take about three weeks.
If that wasn’t worrying enough, the alleged murderer claimed he assisted his girlfriend’s suicide. She slit her wrists and when that didn’t move matters along quite fast enough, he smothered her with a pillow. Then left her on his couch for two weeks. By the time her family tracked her down, there wasn’t much left of her besides...well, if you’ve ever watched CSI, you know what I mean. The house that the boyfriend lived in has, in fact, been condemned and is slated to be torn down because it is beyond salvageable. She sort of leaked into a lot of places where she can’t be removed.
The defense attorney had a lot of pictures to share and the lad was beginning to get a little nauseated thinking about it. It’s one thing to see it on a TV show, but something entirely different when it’s a real person. But, at the last minute, the alleged murderer decided to plead guilty and forgo a jury trial. In some kind of plea deal, he’ll be given a life sentence with the possibility of parole in 15 years with a 2nd degree murder charge. He took it.
The next case was dismissed.
And the third case was a medical malpractice trial. The lad was selected for the jury. I’m not sure of the technical details, but at the end of the selection process, each attorney was allowed to dismiss two jurors for any reason whatsoever without comment. The defense attorney booted the lad off the jury. Didn’t like his looks or something. That trial would have lasted about a week and a half. Would have been interesting, but he’s not too upset about being booted, although he’d like to know what was wrong with him. Kind of insulted, I think.
So that was his big day in the city. Apparently real life is a lot weirder than most of us realize. I guess the television writers have to get their material somewhere.
The only time I served on a jury it was a pretty clearcut robbery. Night manager of a Jack-in-the-Box stole the night’s take (the video over the bank night deposit vault showed he’d never dropped the bag into it). Pretty mundane, and since I was unemployed at the time I’d have been up for a five-week gaudy murder case, although that one sounds more gory than gaudy.
The thing they don’t tell you about jury duty is all the time you spend waiting around, between the lawyers conferring, the continuances, and in my case, the two full days arguing with one holdout on the jury who kept coming up with theories about how the guy might not have been the thief. We finally persuaded him that the evidence was all we could go on, not the scripts he kept writing.
Yes, I heard complaints about the time spent waiting and milling around waiting for something to happen yesterday. It is an imperfect system.
I have not yet had the pleasure of serving on a jury. (Watch my jury duty notice arrive in the mail tomorrow.) I think it would be really interesting.
With regard to juror script-writing...the lad’s friend who drove over with him, was seated on a jury for a hit and run trial. It was a quick trial and they finished up by the end of the day. In this case, there was unanimous agreement that the defendant was as guilty as sin, but the state failed to provide enough evidence for a clear conviction. So they regretfully voted Not Guilty. Not exactly script-writing, though the temptation was there. As far as the jury was concerned, justice was not served and they were angry about it. Adding insult to injury, when they filed out of the room, the defendant winked at them repeatedly and thanked them for their hard work. In such a way that several of them apparently wanted to punch him in the face. Makes you wonder.