kate_schaefer | My civic duty

Last week, we voted. The week before that, I had jury duty.

I love jury duty.

I don't love getting up early to drive through unfamiliar and unpleasant traffic, sit in a roomful of strangers, answer eccentric questions about peculiarities of my personal history, or decide someone's fate. I don't love any of the particulars of jury duty; like many of the things about which I'm enthusiastic in principle, actually fulfilling jury duty is inconvenient and dull. What I love is the concept --- an impartial group of citizens representing the people chosen at random to decide whether someone has broken the law. Direct participation in democracy! Since I love the concept and since I'm a self-righteous prig about concepts I love, I love jury duty.

The impartial citizens aren't chosen completely at random in this county; we're selected from the rolls of registered voters. That seems like a reasonable criterion to me; registration to vote demonstrates enough engagement in the civic process to eliminate most of those I wouldn't want to have on a jury. It's relatively easy to be excused from jury duty when one receives a notice, as well; one can reschedule a year out for any reason whatsoever, or one can ask to be excused for hardship. People who aren't interested enough in justice to serve on juries can usually come up with a way of getting out of it, and good riddance to them.

I've been on jury duty twice before and seated on a jury once. Both times, the majority of my time was spent sitting around reading. This time, I arrived in Kent, checked in, filled out the juror's form, listened to the judge whose turn it was to give the juror pep talk (he did a good job; no doubt he's delivered the speech approximately four zillion times, but he managed to sound cheerful and enthusiastic nevertheless).

Once he left, I settled in to read my book and was immediately called to go to a courtroom for voir dire. For the rest of the day, I was Juror #42 of 55.

First the judge explained that this would be a long trial. Oh, damn, I thought, there goes everything I wanted to do in November. Then he explained that by "long" he meant "two to four days." By that standard, I suppose a short-to-medium length trial is one to two days, and anything over four days is really, really long. He excused all the self-employed people and the person who takes care of her elderly father, checked for medical problems and anybody who knew the defendant, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, or several witnesses socially, then set the attorneys loose to whittle down those who remained.

Based on the questions they asked, I know that the county intended to present evidence that the defendant had led police on an erratic car chase, failing to stop for lights, sirens, and loudspeaker, and that he had a gun in his car when he was finally stopped, which was against the law because he's a convicted felon. I gathered that the defense intended to argue that the prosecution's evidence wasn't compelling, or that the cops had a grudge against the defendant, or that it was somebody else's gun, or that the road was all twisty and the defendant couldn't see the cop.

Much of voir dire felt like a cooperative exercise, with judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney all trying to educate the jurors as much as possible while eliciting information about the jurors' opinions and experiences to make sure that they'd end up with an unbiased jury, or at least a jury without obvious biases.

The attorneys made notes. "Is there anyone here who thinks people should be allowed to carry guns into a bar?" asked the prosecutor. I put up my hand, with a scattering of company: second amendment, NRA, if the person has a gun permit, it's valid wherever the person goes, and me: "I don't think people should carry guns into bars -- I think it shows poor judgment -- but I think it should be legal. I think a lot of things should be legal that people still shouldn't do."

"Is there anyone here who thinks convicted felons should be allowed to own guns?" asked the prosecutor. Two hands went up, one of them mine. The prosecutor asked the other person why he thought that. "I'm a convicted felon myself," he said. There was a titter of nervous laughter. "That was twenty years ago, and I think I learned my lesson then."

The prosecutor turned to me. "It's a civil right, and I think it should be restored with other civil rights when the felon applies to have those restored," I said. I didn't feel terrific about hanging out alone with the ex-con, but when that's where principle takes me, I'm going there. I told you I was a prig.

The prosecutor told a little fable about children and their babysitter and a broken lamp, then asked questions based on the fable. What I wanted to say was that the parent in his example was a twit, but that wasn't relevant to the jury process, so I didn't.

The defense attorney's turn came after the afternoon break. He expanded on the prosecutor's fable and got all tangled up in the characters. I could have used a chart to keep track of the mom, the boy, the sister, the babysitter, the next door neighbor boy, the next door neighbor girl, and just who it was that had a crush on whom, and so could the defense attorney. I think the point of his narration was to demonstrate that apparently straightforward narratives can be complicated by the tangled web of emotional relationships among people who know each other.

His last question was addressed to me. "Forty-two, you've said a number of interesting things today." It is a mistake to be thought interesting by an attorney. "Why do you think people should be allowed to carry guns into bars?"

"There are a lot of things that I don't think people should do that should nevertheless be legal," I said. I say "nevertheless" in conversation; I bet you do, too.

"And why is that?" asked the defense attorney.

I hadn't had my philosophical underpinnings questioned in public in years, though while I was in college it was a daily event. "I believe that there are many elements of personal conduct that are matters of people's private relations with each other and not appropriate areas for the state to regulate," I said, or words pretty close to that. There was a little murmur of approval from my fellow jurors, even though they mostly thought no one should be allowed to take a gun into a bar.

"And why is that?" asked the defense attorney.

Whadya mean, why is that? I thought. As I started to say something less stupid but much longer and completely inappropriate for the setting about the foundations of society, the rights of the individual, and the origins of the rule of law, the judge's timer went off and he told the defense attorney that he was out of time.

"Because I'm an American," I muttered, and got another murmur of approval from the assembled jurors. Bad behavior on my part, really, but satisfying. Satisfying, nevertheless.

The judge moved a couple people out of the front row of waiting jurors into the jury box, and the attorneys began dismissing jurors in earnest. Already gone were the two activists for MADD, the NRA member, the people with close friends or family members killed by drunk drivers (but no one had mentioned anything about alcohol in the preamble about evidence they intended to present later; were there assumptions about drinking and driving inherent in the erratic driving, had the defendant refused a breathalyzer test, or was there just so much other stuff going on that it might be a factor but wasn't part of the charges?), the pacifists, the other people with extreme objections to private ownership of guns, folks with close friends or relations who were cops, the guy who lived near the area of the car chase, and the woman who said she couldn't be fair. Now the attorneys didn't have to say why they were dismissing anyone, and they each dumped seven. I hadn't kept track of what most of the proto-jurors had said, but I did see that the prosecuting attorney dismissed the reformed felon as soon as he was up, the defense attorney dismissed the people with more distant friends hurt by drunk drivers, and one of them dismissed the people for whom English wasn't their first language

The last seated juror was number 40. I'd had lunch with her, and I knew she really wanted to be on a jury, because she felt it was her duty. She'd been called for jury duty before, but never selected.

I was relieved when we left the room and were told we didn't have to come back the next day. I was definitely with the judge when he said that serving on a jury was always a hardship for everyone, so only those for whom being on the jury constituted an extraordinary hardship could be excused for that. It wouldn't be an extraordinary hardship for me, just an inconvenience, so I was prepared to serve, if chosen.

It's mildly unsettling to walk away from a story that I know this much about. Since I'm not a juror, I can speculate wildly about what actually happened. Did the defendant carry the gun into a bar, drink a lot, brandish the gun wildly, fire a few shots into the mirror over the bartender's head, and flee, driving his eighteen-wheeler erratically down the highway, hooping and hollering and carrying on with the wild woman at his side, who turned out to be the arresting officer's juvenile delinquent little sister?

Could be. Might be.

Probably not.