--Justinian

I started jury duty today.

Now, it occurs to me that I've been taking for granted that everybody knows what jury duty is, here in the United States, and that this might be a false assumption. A disproportionate percentage of my readership appears to be Australian, after all, and they seem to think it's winter now, so there's no telling what notions they might have about American courts. (Umm, sorry, guys. No offense intended. Really. Any country capable of producing Rolf Harris is quite all right with me...)

Anyway. The basic idea is like this. According to the terms of the United States Constitution (a rather old document, named after a ship, I believe), citizens in criminal trials have the right to trial by jury, consisting of people from the area in which the crime was allegedly committed.

In order for this to work, jurors are needed, which is where jury duty comes in. We citizens are obligated to serve as jurors every now and again, and summonses are sent out to various individuals to accomplish this. I'm not clear on exactly where the courts find all the names, but voter registrations and driver's licenses are definitely two of the primary sources.

The idea is basically to keep judges from having too much power, and to prevent a small group of individuals from doing whatever they want. It's also thought that ordinary people -- a class that presumably includes the defendant -- will have a better grasp of the situation than a judge, who might be more sheltered, and/or from a different social class. Or something to that effect; I may be wildly off here. If so, y'all can feel free to correct me.

Needless to say, most people try to avoid serving as jurors altogether, leading to the observation that the American judicial system consists of having cases decided by twelve people who were too stupid to be able to get out of jury duty. I don't happen to agree with this assessment, partially because it fails to account for the idealists. Myself humbly included. (Okay, not very humbly, at that.)

Anyway, enough background. If you want to know more, let me know, but I think that about covers the basics.

Being an occasional listener to National Public Radio, I was able to muse that only New Yorkers would have the opportunity to stand on line in the first place; apparently, in other parts of the country, people always stand in line. New Yorkers do both, of course, but they probably stand on line more often than in line. It's not something I'd ever thought about before I heard it mentioned on the radio, though.

It's not as if prepositions are supposed to make any sense. I mean, a man might get on a train, to get to the house in which he lives, which is on Long Island, in New York, on the coast, arriving at 9:00 in the evening, on June 30th, in 1999. Uh huh.

But I digress.

Somewhere around 12:15, my name was called, for the fourth group of jurors, if I recall correctly. There were... perhaps sixty of us? Maybe seventy? I wasn't counting. We were sent across the street to the criminal court, where we got to go through a metal detector and have our bags X-rayed, before proceeding to another room. Where we waited until 1 PM, at which point we were dismissed for lunch, with instructions to return by 2.

To sum up briefly, then. At about 3 PM, we were finally summoned to the courtroom, where we were sworn in, and the jury selection process began. At 4 or so, we were dismissed, with instructions to return at 2 PM the next day to continue the jury selection process, as they had some legal stuff to work out in the morning.

And that'll do for now, I suppose.