Disorderly Content

If you've never experienced total boredom and total fascination at one and the same time, clearly you've never served on a jury. Okay, truth be told, neither have I. But I got to experience jury selection firsthand for the very first time, which is enough boredom/fascination for me to make my claim. It isn't nearly as dramatic as Perry Mason or Matlock made it out, I must say. Granted, the case in question wasn't murder, although it did involve the phrase "deadly weapon". And maybe there would be some surprises and oooh! moments during the actual trial. But I doubt it.

Why, I hear you ask. Well, let me tell you something I never saw on TV drama: by the time the juror questioning was done I (and the rest of the prospective jurors) knew pretty much everything about the case. We knew the charges, we knew who the witnesses would be, we knew what the chief witness was likely to say, we knew that the accused wasn't going to testify. In fact, we knew the defense wasn't going to put on any witnesses at all. And we knew that that defense wasn't questioning what happened, merely what the defendant was thinking when he did what he did. (Do you have to say allegedly if neither side seems to dispute it?) So even though I won't be there for the actual trial, about the only thing that's in question is the verdict. And I know where I'd place my bet on that one.

The other big surprise were the jurors, who either didn't watch much courtroom drama or didn't understand what they were seeing. Some of the questions and comments from the jurors would have been laughable if they weren't so serious. Heck, even then; I was wondering how the judge and the attorneys kept a straight face when one juror explained about a domestic violence incident in her own family that was, as she put it, never persecuted. Which might have been a slip, expect she used that same word twice more within a few minutes. A pretty embarrassing mistake, I'd have thought, but even worse from a schoolteacher. I always thought you were supposed to know more than your students.

Anyway, jury selection took three hours yesterday and another hour and a half this morning, at which point the rest of us were sent on our way with a promise of $15 payment plus .34 a mile for our one day of service. But we only get paid one way; I guess they don't care how we get home. Or if.