My Civic Duty Explored

Today was extremely successful. I made $6 by showing up for jury deselection, as the judge put it. So here is what happened...

Showed up at 8:35 and drove around the courthouse looking for a parking spot. Of course, there was not one to be had! Ended up parking several blocks away and hiked back to the courthouse to report in with 2 minutes to spare at 8:45 AM. There was a whole pile of fine Americans in the room with me, where we sat and heard an extended discussion about the parking pro's and cons around the courthouse.

It turned out that we were the jury pool for four different courts, two county courts and two district courts. They divided the large group into four smaller groups and I happened to end up with one of the county courts. We were sent down to a break room to await the bidding of the court. We ended up waiting for quite some time while the judge and attorney's did their thing. Two of the four scheduled cases pled guilty right off the bat, which is why we ended up waiting.

Finally, around 10:30, the jury pool was seated in the courtroom. I ended up being lucky number 60! Anyone who is familiar with jury selection knows that the higher your jury number, the less chance of being selected. So I had a pretty good chance of not being selected.

The case they were selecting for sounded fairly interesting. It was a felony handgun assault case that carried a penalty of between 2 to 20 years in jail. They told us the case would probably take two days to complete. Long story short...I didn't get selected for this case. We ended up being given a lunch break at 12:30 and were told to report back at 1:45 PM. I ran over to work and downloaded my email unto my laptop (don't rate a Blackberry...yet) and then ran to Sonic for a burger. Hurried back to the courthouse to sit for another hour. I used the time to work on some email. Finally, we were called back in where we received the good news that the final case had pled guilty and we were officially dismissed! Hurray!

Thus ended the civic duty of Juror number 60.