I’m such a nerd. I’m a total goober about civic engagement. Yes, I am one of those people who was glad to get summoned for Jury Duty… in the month of my 36th birthday, now that I’ve spent half of my life as an eligible juror, I finally got my call. Here’s my review of the way that my local government handles this stuff, as well as some general stories about the experience. In general, it was a very positive experience for me, and I don’t think I’m just saying that because I’m such a goober.

**The Jury Duty Hotline**

I got the notice in September or so. I filled out a questionaire, on which I was allowed to specify any dates between Oct 1 and Dec 31 that I wouldn’t be willing to serve. I mailed it back, and a while later they mailed me back to say that I was on call for December (minus some dates close to xmas and new years). Cool. I was instructed to call the Message Line, which I call the Jury Duty Hotline, every night in December. OK.

On November 30, I called it the first time. No jurors needed tomorrow. OK. So it was for more of the following days. I must admit that one day they forgot to update it, which I sure hope doesn’t happen very often. However, I suspect that anyone who failed to show up after the message was not updated by the required time would not be held responsible for not showing up.

Much to my surprise, the first day that jurors were needed, they listed the juror numbers one at a time. Why not just do something like “juror numbers 100-150″? I don’t know. Instead it was along these lines: “The following Jurors should report: numbers 125, 138, 198, 204, 419…[etc]“. Unless there’s some rule by which these numbers need to be assigned to people, they should be able to build in just about any degree of randomness and it would seem to make their work a lot simpler, not to mention making the hotline a lot faster to check. *shrug*

Anyway, the first day they called jurors they called 13 numbers, none which were mine. Thirteen seemed like a weird number, but a lawyer friend of mine pointed out that most civil cases seat fewer than 12 jurors. OK.

I checked last Friday and they listed a LOT of juror numbers. I didn’t count how many, but it was around 50, and it included my number. So, this morning, I reported at 8 am to the justice building.

**Checking In**

The most obvious improvement that I can think of to make to the system would be to do parking better. Here’s how it works: park in the garage on 7th and Walnut (above Scotty’s). Walk to the justice building, a block and a half away. Go through security check there, walk upstairs, and check in. Take the parking permit they give you back to the garage, and hang it on your car. Walk back to Justice Building. So, instead of walking 1-2 blocks, you walk a total of 4-5 block, just because they don’t have a system. Why don’t they mail us the parking permit, along with a warning that it can only be used on the day we are first called in? It should be a simple administrative task to let the meter checkers know which juror numbers are called in that day.

But, I gotta say, if that’s the best improvement I can imagine, they must be doing better than a lot of court systems around. I’ve heard countless stories of sitting around for days just waiting to be called in. I vowed to take a book, but realized after I had parked my car that I’d forgotten to actually bring it. D’oh! I bought a *Herald Times* **and** picked up a copy of the *Indiana Daily Student* to keep me company in case of a long wait.

Once back upstairs, we sat in a courtroom. The jury-master (I don’t know what her real title is, but she was the one who checked us in, and seemed to be the one whose voice was on the Hotline) welcomed us, thanked us, expressed her understanding that we probably didn’t want to be there (I, uh, just smiled and nodded), and introduced us to a sixteen minute video about jury duty.

**The Movie**

Produced by the State of Indiana, the video was downright dorky. The main speaker was skilled at talking to a camera, but I don’t think there was any way to make his message sound anything but dorky. I’m sure you can imagine what it said, so I won’t try to recreate it. Two comments, though:

First, like so many similar things, it still accomplishes its goal. I mean, it tells you what’s going to happen to you, who is going to tell you what, what is expected of you. I’m sure most of us know most of this stuff, but who knows where there’s a hole in someone’s understanding, that would result in a juror, say, entering the courtroom during a private meeting between the judge and the lawyers, which could result in the dismissal of the whole case. So, like the safety talks before airline flights, even though it can seem silly, I think it’s a good idea.

Second, video editing software sure has had an effect on stuff like this… there were all kinds of gratuitous logos, crossfades, and other video effects that never would have been in the budget allocated for this kind of thing before five years or so ago. Still, even if some of that looks slick, it still is very obviously low-budget production.

**Waiting**

Ok, so after the movie, we were led into a waiting room. We proceeded to wait. I read my *IDS* first. I decided it’d be a good time to do the crossword puzzle. I’m a beginning crossworder, so the rather simple puzzles in the IDS are well-suited to my skills. I was surprised that most people there did not have books, newspapers, knitting, or anything else to keep them occupied. *shrug*

For a while, people were quiet, but people eventually started chatting. I talked occassionally with the woman next to me about my puzzle, she gave me a couple of answers, but seemed generally impressed with my abilities. I explained that I only recently got over the “how could I possbly do this??” hump. Lots of people listened in on this conversation, in general the atmosphere became quite chummy. Eventually, people started taking sections of my copy of the *HT*, which I had deliberately left on the table in case anyone else wanted to read it.

And so it went for about two hours. I eventually retrieved the part of the *HT* with the *New York Times Crossword* and got a start on it. At about 11 am, though, the Bailiff came and lined us up to enter the courtroom. We had been assigned a different number this morning, which represented our order to be questioned for a seat on the jury. Mine was 31, from which I concluded that my odds of actually being seated on this 12 person jury were pretty low. *sigh*

**The Courtroom**

We entered the courtroom in a line, just like you see on TV shows. We were welcomed by Judge Kenneth Todd, who I’ve met personally at some meetings over the years. Nice guy. The first thing he did was apologize for the wait. He seemed very sincere when he stated that that 1-2 hour wait was much longer than normal and that he was really sorry about it. Wow. I mean, most people I hear talk about jury duty tell me about sitting there for days waiting to be called. If two hours is long and deserving of a profuse apology… yeah, my hat’s off to this court. I couldn’t even get through two newspapers in the amount of time I waited! I wonder if that’s why so few people had brought reading materials with them, maybe they had friends who said that the waiting wasn’t that bad. *shrug*

So, Judge Todd talked a lot about what was going to be asked of us, about “beyond reasonable doubt” as a standard of proof, and about the process of *Voir Dire* that we were about to undergo. And then, that process started. He asked us a whole bunch of general questions: are we over 18, do we live in Monroe County, do we have any disabilities that might impair our ability to serve. etc. Then he introduced us to the defendant, his lawyer, the prosecuting attorney. And, with that, the prosecutor grabbed a stand for his notes and came and stood right in front of us.

His name is Joby Jerrels, and he’s the (a?) Assistant Prosecutor here in Monroe County. He asked some general questions along the line of the Judges, but most of his were clearly setting up his case. He talked about reasonable doubt, but it was clearly with a slant of making sure people realized that reasonable doubt was not the same as no possible kind of doubt. One line of questioning went something like this: “Have you ever taken a trip? On a plane? Do you know how airplanes work? Do you know the story of Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree? So you know that objects fall to the ground. And you know that a plane is a very heavy object. But you still got on that plane. Why? Weren’t you worried?” I gotta say, I certainly know what he was trying to get at, but I didn’t think he really got me there. He wanted us all to go, “Ok, maybe all the stories I’ve heard of airplanes flying safely were just rumors, and maybe I’m going to die here.” But, if he had been addressing me, I would have at least have had to have said “there *is* a reasonable doubt in my mind that the plane will arrive at its destination safely. But it’s a risk I’m willing to take.” He *might* have replied that this wasn’t the risk he was talking about, but rather he was asking whether I had any reasonable doubt that the plane had any hope of flying. I think. If that’s where he was trying to get me, he didn’t really make it.

The other issue that he talked a lot about was “possession”. He kept coming back to one hypothetical scenario: “Mr. Blah, say that I asked you to give me a ride to Cincinnati next Saturday. I have a friend there who is going to give me a ticket to a basketball game, but I’ve broken my foot and can’t drive. We’ll take my car, but I need you to drive it. Ok, now say that I ask if you have a cooler you can bring. You say yes, and I fill the cooler with ice and beverages, and put it in the trunk. Now, who possesses the beverages?” If I had been asked this, I would have replied “well, I assume that laws that concern themselves with possession have a definition (either by legislation or legal precedent) of what constitutes possession.” I wonder if he would have liked that answer or not. :) Doesn’t much matter though, because I didn’t get asked. People talked about a lot of things, but none of them sounded convincing to me, which was probably bad news for Mr. Jerrels, but I don’t know.

Anyway, after a good long while of that, the defending attorney spoke (without notes). David Collins, I’ve just learned from the Monroe County Web site, is the Deputy Public Defender. If that was said in the courtroom, I didn’t get it. I wouldn’t have guessed it, either. He asked a number of questions, but also focused on the same themes of reasonable doubt and possession. His presentation made more sense to me, focusing on possession requiring some knowledge and will on the part of the possessor. For instance, he was able to get just about anyone he asked to agree that if a person didn’t know that there were beverages in the cooler in the trunk, then it isn’t fair to say that that person possesses the beverages, even if s/he is driving the car. Anyway, I won’t try to replay the whole thing.

The other thing he focused on, in detail, was the presumption of innocence. He asked everyone, “if you had to vote right now on this case, how would you vote?” The correct answer, which was clear if you’d been listening to the presentation, was “Not Guilty”. This was an interesting way of thinking of things, and I liked thinking of it that way. Our legal system says that the correct answer is not “well, how should I know? I haven’t heard any evidence one way or the other!” True, you don’t know, but our legal system tells the juror that in a criminal case, not knowing means that you presume the defendant to be innocent. The State has to take you from presuming them innocent all the way to demonstrated, beyond reasonable doubt, that they are guilty. It does sound difficult when you put it that way, which is surely what Mr. Collins wanted us to get out of it.

Every potential juror was asked specifically, by the attorneys you’d presume, both “if the State proves its case beyond reasonable doubt, how will you vote?” and “if the State fails to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt, how will you vote?” I think the most obvious requirement to making it onto this jury was being able to answer both of those questions correctly, believably and confidently.

And, I think that’s good. After I was dismissed for not being selected, I chatted with a co-worker about it. He wondered if they asked a lot of questions about political leanings and such. No, they didn’t. For instance, I could have imagined being asked if we thought the drug laws of the State and of the Nation were just and fair. No one was asked this. And, this makes sense to me. The jury’s job has nothing to do with whether the laws are just. They just have to hear the evidence and an explanation of the law, and decide if the law was broken. I suppose if someone is so convinced that such that a law *is* unjust that, as an act of civil disobedience, they would refuse to convict anyone of it regardless of the evidence, then that would matter. But we weren’t asked that specifically.

I suppose that that purpose with met, though: People were asked if they had any personal convictions about drugs or guns that would make it difficult or impossible for them to serve objectively. One woman did, stating that she thought substance abuse was such a bad thing that she thinks anyone involved with it should be punished. Woah. I wonder if she had a drug addict in her family or something, or if she was just trying to get out of jury duty. But, uh, yeah, the judge walked her through the factors here. Since the defendant was presumed innocent, we couldn’t even say that he is involved with drug use, and surely she wouldn’t want someone to be unfairly convicted of something she found heinous. She agreed. He further pointed out that suspects in trials of murder, rape, and other heinous crimes also deserve fair trials, and we surely would have trouble creating juries if people who found such crimes terrible refused to be seated as jurors. She agreed again. But, when asked again if she could be objective she still said no. Interesting. I suppose, if she’s being entirely upfront, that I at least have to salute her willingness to recuse herself rather than seize the opportunity to try to really stick it to someone who might be innocent, guilty, or innocent of the charges before the court but still guilty of something else. Still, I was surprised by her statements, though certainly not by the fact that she was excused.

I was impressed by just about everyone involved with the case. Judge Todd was just as congenial as I remember him to be in less formal settings (I really don’t think people around here go in much for pomp). Both lawyers were civil, with each other and with the jury pool, and they seemed focused on just the kinds of issues I feel like they each should be focused on. The bailiff was friendly and really did provide a sense of comfort to me. I told myself: “Just do whatever he leads you to do, and you don’t have to remember much else.” And, my fellow propective jurors seemed very honestly engaged in the process and seemed to treat the whole thing with due respect. Some of them seemed uncomfortable speaking in such a setting, but that’s neither surprising or troubling.

So, although I am somewhat disappointed that I didn’t actually get to be a juror, it still left me feeling very proud of my involvement in the system. Revoking someone’s freedom is a really serious matter, and the way that we do that in the United States seems really smart. Needless to say, it’s far from perfect, but I’d rather have juries being misled by slick (or incompetent) attorneys than corrupt governmental officials brokering deals with each other on who gets convicted, or anything like that. So, I feel good about it. And now, as I understand it, it’ll be at least two years before I am required/invited to report as a potential juror again.