Artie'cles 6

A Comprehensive Guide to Being Summoned to Jury Duty

For those who have never experienced jury duty selection, it is something quite special. Humans instinctively have a natural aversion to it. Even those who have never served on a jury before know that they do not want to participate. But, alas, it is our civic responsibility. That is, unless you do not have a driver license or state identification card. Of course if you are completely healthy, old enough to serve on a jury, and do not have either a driver license or a state id card, you probably will never be in need of a jury and thus you should not have to serve. Your mamma will most likely be your judge and jury.

If you do get summoned, make sure you leave your home well before you have to check in. If you live in Tallahassee, the jury parking is about a brisk 20-minute walk away from the courthouse.

Once you get to the courthouse and pass through the metal detectors, bagels, pastries, and coffee will greet you. Definitely partake. If you pass on these items, your stint at being a juror will be a complete loss. Milk every drop of coffee and every jelly-filled doughnut out of the experience.

After gorging on the continental breakfast, you will go into a large room and wait. This is juror purgatory. When the first judge comes in, he will read a list of statues and ask if anyone fails to meet the criteria listed in the statues. Since these are listed on the jury summons you get in the mail, there should be nobody in the room that fails to meet the criteria. Of course this assumes that you can read. If you cannot read, you are quite possibly the perfect candidate to determine the fate of the person on trial.

On a personal note, while listening to the statues (including the ineligibility of convicted felons) I overheard one man asked a very profound question. “Do you still have to serve if you commit a felony while in the waiting room?” I had to wonder whether you would have to serve if you, per chance, were a victim of a felony while in the waiting room. I considered teaming up with this guy, but I was unable think of any felonies to which I would be willing to fall victim.

Once the statues are read and lame excuses are heard, you earn a half hour break. Sitting down in a big room is such a laborious task that you should take the break time to recover by sitting down in the big room. This is the courthouse logic. Don’t question it, just follow it.

Once the break is over, you will be sorted like a deck of cards and sent to a courtroom. In the courtroom you get to sit in the wooden pew-like seats. If you ever watch court television, you will notice that nobody in the audience ever smiles. This has nothing to do with the case. It is quite impossible to smile while sitting in the court pews. Ergonomics clearly has nothing to do with justice.

It is in the courtroom that Marxism’s class power struggle worldview becomes apparent. In the pews and in the jury box are the common people who get paid $15 a day (unless you get paid by your current employer in which case you get nothing) to be jurors, while the Judge gets the highchair and robe and the overpaid lawyers get the tables with glasses of water. The irony is that these disgruntled common people who might get $15 a day for their jury service are the ones who have the power to use the word guilty or innocent. I personally would not want the people who were going to determine how much I am fined and how long I could spend in jail to be disgruntled and underpaid.

Once you are in the courtroom, you have another chance to use a lame excuse to get out of jury duty. Everyone does this. Everyone. Unless you are like me and can use the excuse that you are busy protecting everyone from the wrath of hurricanes and have a federal excusal from jury service you will probably not get out of your service.

Around noon you will get an hour and 15 minutes for lunch. You can either a) use this time to walk to your car drive around for a few minutes and attempt to get your parking spot back b) spend the $15 bucks you might get on lunch downtown or c) be like me and bring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and eat under a tree.

When you get back, you will go into jury purgatory again and watch either CNN or Fox News. If you are lucky like me, a man with a rather large beer belly will stand up and change the channel to a talk show. Montel on the day I served. Once the large man gets tired of hearing people blame their parents for their failed lives, he will change the channel again. This time I got to watch part of the movie Jaws. Sometime around 2pm you will probably wish a large shark would jump out of the TV and chomp you in half. This does not usually happen as large robotic sharks have yet to develop the ability to jump out of television sets.

After you watch more television, a lady will come into the room and dismiss everyone. You can then ponder why they did not release you at noon instead of having you come back to watch television, but this also is courthouse logic.

If you are lucky, this ends your jury experience. If you are not so lucky, you will spend the rest of the week flipping the big guilty/innocent coin they keep in the deliberation rooms. Until then, the magic eight ball says “The Jury Is Still Out”.