I thought I would write about how jury duty goes, both for fellow USAmericans who haven't done it and are wondering about the process and for those who will never be called up for jury duty in the US but who are just generally interested in how institutions like this operate.

Anyway, I was alerted at the beginning of December that I was to come to judicial building starting this morning at 9. I arrived early, and so did a bunch of people. So we all had to stand around waiting for 9. We were given lanyards by the very kind bailiffs (they were all retirement-age people, so I wonder if it's a volunteer position? I will look into this), and when the doors opened, we filed in and gave the person at the desk our name. In turn, they gave us a parking pass, an information card with phone numbers for us to call for the rest of the week, and a badge to put on our lanyard. On one side, the badge was blue and said JUROR really big (this, it was explained later, was so that if we're walking down the hall to the bathroom and we talk to two lawyers talking about a case we might be on, the lawyers would know and would stop talking about it. A good thing) and on the back was our juror number.

It took a while to get all 299 people into the room (only one person didn't show up). So I sat and read my book for a while until the assistant/deputy clerk of court (I can't remember which her title was) came in and took roll call. The lawyers for this week's cases were all seated along one side of the room. When our name was called, we had to stand up, look at them, and tell them our name, age, occupation, marital status, and occupation of our spouse if we had one. As you can imagine, it takes a while to get through 299 people, but it was quite interesting seeing the range of people and what their occupations were. Hilariously, there was one woman whose husband is an archivist, and I turned around to look at her when she said that, and she made an, "I know, can you believe it? Two archivist-related people in one room?" face at me, which was charming. Also, another person who works in the libraries was there, though I didn't talk to him.

After we established that everyone was there and the lawyers all took notes on what they could judge of our appearance and answers, there was a round of "Who Gets Exempt." A judge came in and did this one. She would ask questions and if they applied to us, we would stand and tell them your number. She did explain quite clearly that if any of the questions were of a sensitive nature and we didn't want to stand up in front of everyone, we could come to talk to her about it later, which I appreciated.

Some of the reasons you might get exempt: if you've done jury duty in the last year or a grand jury in the past few years, if you have a medical condition that might complicate it, if you have very young children at home and are the primary caregiver, if you are a felon, if you're a full-time student or teacher, if you have less than a 6th grade education, if you don't speak English well. Also, if you're over the age of 65, you can opt out. I was happy to see that none of the people who were older than that did opt out--as the judge said (and I quite agree), we want people with the wisdom of experience to serve.

Then at the end, if you had indicated that one of those applied to you, you would go up one by one and talk to the judge and she would either excuse you (say for something medical), transfer you to another time (say if you were a student or if you had some pressing personal thing that you had to take care of this week), or tell you that you were not excused. I would say about 25 people went up into the line and about 12 of them were excused or transferred at this time.

After a break, the judge who was seeing today's case came in. It was a criminal case against a youngish black man who was pleading not guilty to not pulling over when a cop car tried to get him to. In December of 2023. I obviously have Feelings about this, but we won't get into those.

The judge read the charges to us, told us what our duty would be to listen to everything and how the jury process would work. And then we did another round of "Are You Disqualified?" He told us the names of everyone involved (the defendant, lawyers for both sides, witnesses, etc.) and asked if anyone knew any of them. None did. Then he asked if any of us knew anything about the case before we came in (like from media reports or local gossip). None did. Then he asked a series of questions that I was unsure of how to answer.

They were essentially like, "Have you had any relationship with law enforcement that might keep you from being unbiased?" [Which. Like. Everyone is biased. Come on.] One middle aged white guy stood up and said that cops had lied about him when he was in college so he was disinclined to believe them. I have not had any personal experiences with cops myself, so I didn't say anything. But the next question was basically something like, "Do you have beliefs about law enforcement that might keep you from being impartial?" And I was like... .... .... But the room had a bunch of black people, and I know the black community here doesn't have a great relationship with police even by national standards, so I figured if they could all claim to be impartial, then I could to. Even though I am fully ready to believe that a cop would lie about anything.

After all that, a handful of people were again excused and then we had actual jury selection. My impression is they do it by random assignment of numbers. The deputy clerk would read each number and ask the defense and prosecution lawyers to respond. They would look at the person, at their notes, and either said "please seat this juror" or "please excuse this juror." Y'all, this section was so weirdly suspenseful because sometimes it would take them a while to answer and this person would just be standing there for a while, waiting to know. And when they did ask that people be exempt, I know we were all trying to figure out why they exempted this person or that person. Sometimes you could have a fairly good guess--the defense tended to ask for white people who had military backgrounds to be excused, the prosecution asked to excuse working-class black men. This is gross, but not surprising.

But sometimes I have literally no idea why they chose to use one of their five strikes. The lady sitting next to me was nixed by the defense, and I asked her after if she had any theories as to why and she had no idea.

I was torn about wanting my name to be called. I wanted to see if anyone would nix me! But also I wasn't sure I was the best person to be on this particular case because I would have been embroiled in the moral questions of, "Okay, what if he did do it [like there's video evidence or something], but how ridiculous is it to convict a black man of being scared of the cops, so how should I react?" So it's probably better that I wasn't called.

There was one very weird moment when the judge asked if anyone had heard anything about the case, and this one woman stood up and was like, "I think I know something about the other charges." And the judge and everyone else were like ???? because there were no other charges? This was the only charge? Anyway, she and the lawyers all went up to confer, and the judge was like, "You misunderstood," or something, but later her number was called in the lotto and the defense nixed her, which was a great relief to me because the whole vibe was just very strange.

By the time all that wrapped up it was about 11:30 and we were dismissed for the rest of the day. Tomorrow we go in again and I imagine the procedure is the same. If I do end up on a jury, I will certainly report back on how that goes.

[eta] No, I was wrong. I called the number they gave us and anyone who wasn’t on the jury today does NOT ago in tomorrow but calls tomorrow night to see if they go in Wednesday.