Jury duty, part 1

I had jury duty two weeks ago. They didn’t want me on a jury — no surprise there. The surprise was how interesting the day was, when I had expected no more than bad chairs, bad coffee and bad traffic on the way home. I’ve been meaning to write about it, and then got hopelessly distracted by, well, everything. But our friend turned us on to the movie Runaway Jury which we watched last night (thanks, Liz!), and made me think more about my own experience.

King County has two superior court buildings, the ancient one in Seattle and the new one in Kent, where I was assigned. Nice! Upholstered chairs with arms, flat screen TVs, wifi, coffee and snack machines in the jury room with an espresso stand downstairs (hey, it’s Seattle… we went to get our WA license plate when we first moved back in 1995 and the sign outside was “License Tags and Espresso.” I do not make this up.)

We saw a video about the history of justice in Washington State and Why It Is Important To Not Weasel Out Of Jury Duty. We had an informative speech from a judge about what to expect from the day, along with a reiteration of the don’t-be-a-weasel speech. Then everyone went back to either doing their work (the wifi crowd) or reading their trashy novels (the rest of us). It made me feel great to see so many people reading.

But I didn’t get to read much. I was called into the first jury pool, and spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon in a group of 60 potential jurors undergoing voir dire. The point of voir dire is for everyone to find out enough about potential jurors to decide whether or not they want us on their trial. Generally the prosecution and the defense want different kinds of people, and their questions weren’t always subtle. The subtle part was that they were using the questions to start making their respective cases to us as a group even before the trial was officially underway.

Part of the point of voir dire is to get people to start talking about themselves. It’s fascinating to watch how it plays out. It becomes clear pretty quickly that some people are saying whatever they think will get them out of the building before lunch, in spite of the two weasel lectures plus a third one from the judge. I wanted to take the proto-weasels off into a corner and say you know, these attorneys’ bullshit detectors are pretty highly refined, you’re not fooling them, and the judge is so pissed off at you for trying to ditch your duty that she will keep you here all day if she can…. (And she did, too. I liked the judge, she was relaxed and decisive and tough and, I thought, very fair. And she ran a very smooth courtroom.)

The way it works is that the attorneys take turns asking general questions. We all have numbers, we’re sitting in numerical order, and if we answer “yes” to the question we are supposed to hold up our number so that everyone can write it down. Then the lawyers or the judge have the option of following up individually with any of us to get the details of our answers. The judge warned us that some of the questions might feel intrusive, and told us in the nicest possible way to get over it. Basically, they can ask you anything they want to in voir dire.

Some of the questions:

• Have you or has anyone close to you been the victim of a crime?
  Pretty much everyone said yes.
• Have you or has anyone close to you been accused of a crime?
  Many people said yes, including me since I have a relative who’s been in and out of the prison system for the last 25 years or so.
• Have you ever been a witness to a crime?
  Yep, I caught someone stealing computers at Wizards of the Coast one lunchtime. That was an interesting 10 minutes…
• Have you ever testified as a witness in a trial?
  Yep, see previous answer.
• Do you know anyone associated with this case? (basically anyone physically in the courtroom at that moment, or anyone on the witness list, which they read to us).
  What was really interesting is that in a room of about 70 people, three people did have connections to someone associated with the case. It’s a smaller world than I realize sometimes.
• Do you watch CSI or Law and Order on TV? If you were a juror on a case with no fancy forensic evidence, no DNA or anything like that, would that be a problem for you?
  At least half the crowd watches one of these shows, and at least two of those people said they would not be convinced in a case where there was no forensic evidence.
• Do you think a defendant needs to demonstrate somehow that they are innocent?
  Really. Even after the judge’s very specific lecture about innocent until proven guilty and burden of proof on the prosecution, there were at least three or four people who responded with some version of well, they probably wouldn’t be having a trial if they didn’t do anything wrong….

And so forth. But the most interesting part for me was yet to come…

… and here I must do an Evil Television Trick and say To Be Continued... We have an appointment to go to, and then a friend is coming to dinner. And I am surprising Nicola with apple-blackberry crumble in spite of the sniveling remark (grin).

So I will finish the story tomorrow! (And here it is.)