Jury Duty

I received my 3rd jury summons in 4 years back in July. They can tell you all they want that jury duty is a random process and you won’t get called more than once every 18 months (which they actually DO say in the video they show you when you first arrive), but that is a load of crap. Three times in 4 years – those numbers speak for themselves. And how many times has Josh been called for jury duty? Zero. Zilch. NEVER. So. Not. Random.

Anyway, let me get off my soapbox before I fall…The unfortunate part about living in Fulton County is that you have to go all the way downtown for jury duty. This is bad if you live where I do – way up in North Fulton. So after my fun 3 days off work, I trekked downtown on Tuesday for my jury duty. As much as I did not want to sit there all day & do nothing, I was sort of hoping that my name would never get called, because that would mean that I could go home & my service would be complete. Unfortunately, I was not so lucky. I got called in a group around 10:30 on Tuesday, and we headed down to one of the court rooms to begin the questioning process, or “voir dire”. They asked a ton of different questions (they even asked if anyone likes to read lawyer books or if anyone had ever had a bad experience with a lawyer!), and we all raised our hands to the ones that applied. After this part was done (I’m guessing a little before noon), they went back to each potential juror one by one, asking for more detail on the questions where their hand was raised. A little before 1:30 they were ready to select the 12 people for the jury (we had not had a lunch break yet, and the lady sitting next to me, her stomach was GROWLING!) The very first name called for the jury box: Rebecca Cahill. Nice. So now my 3rd jury summons in 4 years has led to my 3rd time on a jury in 4 years. Why can’t I have that same kind of luck with the lottery???

Thankfully it was a pretty short trial. We did finally get a lunch break around 1:30, and we started the trial around 3:00. We took a break for the day at 5:00, and came back Tuesday morning to continue. We heard witness testimony all morning until 11:30, when we were dismissed for a 2-hour lunch break. I headed out with about 5 other jurors, and since none of us were hungry, we walked down to Underground Atlanta for a brief tour (we had a guy on the jury who just moved here a year ago from Minneapolis, as part of the Delta-Northwest merger). From there, we lost a couple, and the remaining 4 of us decided to keep walking a bit and show this guy the Capitol. I don’t think I’ve been to the Capitol since I was in elementary school. There was even a school group there taking pictures on the steps inside. We walked around until about 12:30 when we decided that we ought to go find some lunch or we’d be sorry later. Someone in the Capitol recommended we head across the street to the “Sloppy Floyd” building. They have a food court in the bottom floor with just about everything – Chick-fil-A, Willy’s, Sonny’s…So we ate there & then headed back. Once we resumed, we heard the last witness (took about 20 minutes), and then we were dismissed back to the jury room for a 45 minute break (aaahhhh…government!) After the break we heard the closing arguments & the court’s charge, then we were finally dismissed to begin deliberating around 4:00. I was not too hopeful that we would finish up before the day was over, but thankfully we did – it was pretty clear how the verdict should go once we clarified ourselves on what the law was, and what we were actually supposed to decide. This was a personal injury case, and the burden of proof was on the plaintiff, to show that the defendant had been negligent. We did not feel they had proved anything, so we found in favor of the defendant. Although I think most people in the room felt that the defendant probably should pay her something (out of goodwill), but not legally obligated, since the plaintiff couldn’t prove they had done anything wrong.

The first time I was selected, it was kind of cool to see the process in action. Now that I’ve done it 3 times, the novelty has definitely worn off. I’m hoping that my name won’t come back up for a very long time – I’d like to make sure that all the other residents of Fulton County get to share in the fun!