The Justice League: Amateur Version

Let's review. Your correspondent is the eleventh of thirteen jurors selected for a civil case and is seated in a fossilized chair from the Inquisition. During quiet moments, the hip screws in the juror to her right can be heard to ease out. It's Day One. We assess our predicament.

The courtroom is presided over by a handsome judge. He is calm, clear, thorough, and altogether spiffy.

Also presiding, above him, on a ledge, is a plastic owl. A good one: no plastic rodents of any kind are observed.

The plaintiff is the only African-American man in the room. In a Portland jury composed primarily of white women in their thirties, this probably works in his favor. Unfortunately, he looks exactly like Clarence Thomas. So it might be a wash.

Right away, during opening arguments, I am experiencing a problem. Let's go back to an earlier moment. I am awakened by an alarm clock I fired ten years ago, it's completely dark outside, and I'm not going fishing. I make my way to the bus stop and am baffled and horrified by the number of citizens who are out and about without any assurance, other than force of solar habit, that daytime will arrive. It's cold. It's dark. It's sleepy as all get-out. Clearly, this is inhumane.

So now I am in the jury box for the next nine hours, and right away I am having trouble keeping my eyes open. It's early in the case, and I'm sure I can catch up, but it is important that I look like I'm paying attention. This causes stress. My eyelids are threatening to snap shut audibly. If I close them, adopting a look of concentration, there is no guarantee I will not drool, also audibly. I am told this is confusing and alarming to spectators. So we have a situation. If you have ever found yourself falling asleep at the wheel, you will recall that even the imminent likelihood of turning yourself into paste on a bridge abutment is not sufficient to keep you awake. This is similar.

The good news is, things are lively in the jury room, during breaks. My fellow jurors seem to be unusually intelligent, interesting, and funny. We wasted no time in starting a pool as to the exact minute we'd be called back into the courtroom. Nobody guessed 1:37, and so the pool grows. You want odds? What are the odds you get thrown in with twelve other citizens from a random pool and you're thinking you'd like to spend an evening playing Bananagrams with ALL of them? And might not even win?

You can't count on this. I've been on a number of juries, and there is usually at least one member who has made his decision fifteen years ago, when that asshole did that thing that he'll never forget or forgive. This case, and the conduct of his daily life, will all be run through that particular grinder of an incident and result in precisely the same hamburger every time. There will be another member who will skate right over Judge's instructions and insist "I just know it, okay? I can tell." A third will be sporting a fatal freight of aftershave.

Blue Day. You thought I was kidding?

This jury? Well. When the judge noted that two of us wore a lumberjack plaid one day (the odds of this, in Portland, are very high), we all decided to wear green the next. That had a diluted effect on account of the huge number of ways "green" can be interpreted, from "olive" to "forest" to "red check." The next day we all wore black.

Now that was impressive, and duly noted from the bench. The jury box looked, depending on your point of view, like either an execution squad or a choir loft. For those with the sunnier interpretation, be it noted that a skeleton hanging from a gibbet showed up in the courtroom on the same day. Don't mess with this jury, is what I'm saying.

We're doing charades next week, Bianca's bringing in donuts, and Martha brought enough gimp we should all be able to go home with a lanyard or key fob. Wednesday is Purple Day. Friday we deliberate.

I have no idea what we'll decide. I'm confident justice will be served. This is one sharp jury. Which is why I'm looking forward to Thursday. That's Skit Day.

Twelve Plus A Spare

Ah, jury duty. It's been a decade or so, but before that they called me up every other Wednesday, seemed like. The first few times I was called, the service was for two weeks. That was back when people had careers and maybe were represented by unions and in general the jury duty was an inconvenience or a slight financial hit. These days people's expectations of scraping together food and shelter are much reduced, a condition referred to on the right as "freedom." You ask half the prospective juror pool to sit for two weeks, you're going to run into some attrition in the form of starvation deaths and homicide.

So we are now asked to show up for two days. And that should do it, unless you get called to sit on a trial that lasts longer than that. Which, naturally, is what happened to me.

I'm a union girl and I'm getting my pension either way, so I'm not out any cash. Still, I thought a nice boutique trial of a day or so would be just the ticket, a possible blog post, and an opportunity to dish out a tidbit of justice. More than two days, I felt, was asking a lot of an old lady with a novel to write. Who likes to sleep in.

Our trial was going to go nearly two weeks, so they called up 40 jurors with the hope of sieving out 13. Would this trial present a hardship to anyone? 40 hands shot up and waved like a wheat field. I made an effort but it was clear I was not getting out of this.

An amazing percentage of people, as it turns out, could be described as living paycheck to paycheck, if only they got paychecks. As the hardship stories rolled toward the back of the room, we met folks who were liable to lose two or three of the minimum-wage jobs they were splicing together between food stamp allotments. Or who were going to be out forty big ones if they miss their next plasma donation. Or who were at risk of losing their favorite spot on a warm street grate. Ladies and gentlemen, it's getting medieval out there.

Then there were the medical hardships. Front row, a juror's hip screws were liable to pop out if she had to sit in a juror chair for too many hours in a row. Juror #21 couldn't guarantee he wouldn't bust out howling after three or four days. Juror #28 is the sole caregiver for her mother, who might start to wander if she isn't locked in her bedroom, and the fire department had words with her about that the last time. Third row back, grandpa eats wallpaper if left unsupervised. Fourth row: there's a basket of puppies attached to an explosive device that will detonate if the juror's ankle monitor doesn't register inside his house at least once every four hours.

The judge worked the room. Was Juror #32 aware that sperm donations pay better than plasma? Could Mother benefit from a support hamster? Might it be possible to paint over the wallpaper? What kind of puppies? Don't explosive devices have a less than even chance of going off, on average?

Eventually thirteen of us pulled the short straws and filed in to the jury box. We looked either sullen or sober, depending on your viewpoint. We were sworn in. We, by gum, were set to drop a load of justice on the county. A bigger load than we'd hoped to, but still.

We The People

I've got my Portland-Liberal cred polished up good and shiny now, after bicycling in the rain to jury duty. I think this is my fifth time. I've always enjoyed it and tended to look askance at those fellow citizens who find it a burden, but then again I've always been paid straight mailman wage to sit around and pass judgment on people. Mailmen do that anyway--we have plenty of information to work with and some of us can get a little cranky. This time, as a retired mailman, I got the state's ten dollars, and could hardly claim to be too busy.

I remember a trial of a woman who tripped over a lawn sprinkler at the Street Of Dreams home expo. She got bruised up pretty good and wanted quite a bit of cash from the developers for putting a sprinkler head right where she could trip over it (that would be in the lawn). Her attorney made the point that there wasn't a flag on it, which was true. There was a big wide sidewalk next to it, which many of us over the years have interpreted as a suggestion as to where to walk. We the jury didn't find in her favor, but we felt bad about it. It did seem as though if you're a wide-bodied middle-aged woman with swollen ankles who could not reasonably be expected to stay on the sidewalk when there was a perfectly good shortcut to be had through a minefield of lawn sprinklers, you shouldn't have to come up empty.

Similarly, we the jury did not find in favor of the fellow who lost some fingers in an unfortunate lawnmower malfunction. He claimed the mower blades did not disengage as advertised when he reached through the hole to clean out a clog of grass. We had some issues with this. The mower was still operating at 120 decibels instead of the fifty you would expect if the blades weren't turning. That, and the ambulance crew that found his fingers several yards away had first checked the hole and found it still clogged with grass and unmolested by human hand, fully-fingered or otherwise. When we first sat down in the jury box and looked over at our plaintiff, we thought he might possibly have gotten in a terrible accident that had dished his head in. The poor fellow was slack-jawed and cross-eyed and his head was more or less concave; he looked as though his DNA had assembled him up to the neck and then knocked off for lunch. It was pretty clear that he had tried to unclog his mower while it was running by picking it up under the mowing deck. There wasn't much his attorney could point to by way of demonstrating the degree of his disability: he was not a concert violinist, and he could still operate the remote. The only thing he came up with was that he could no longer climb a ladder to the attic to get the box of Christmas ornaments for his kids. This was sad news, indeed. In that he'd already had kids.

The last time I went to jury duty, they had reduced the service time from two weeks to one day, although people still complain. I waited in the jury room all day and was never called up. This time, I was in the first group; that group of eighteen was culled to a tidy six, and I made that cut too. We heard our case, we found for the defendant, we went home.

It's hard to get any six, let alone twelve, people to see the same thing the same way. Eleven people, for example, can observe a raging drunk in a speeding car flatten a little old lady in the crosswalk, and the twelfth will wonder darkly who would let an old woman out on the street like that and speculate on whether the gentleman couldn't somehow be compensated for getting shredded crone in his radiator.

Nevertheless, in this case, we, the people of Multnomah County, Oregon, found unanimously that the Portland Police should not scream at a man attending his bleeding friend on the sidewalk, spray him with pepper spray a few seconds later, and then arrest him for resisting arrest when his hands went to clutch his burning face instead of folding up meekly behind himself for the handcuffs. We did have one hold-out, a woman who had previously expressed a fondness for the TV show "Cops," and who believed strongly that everyone near a crime scene should volunteer for arrest just to make things easier on the police, who have a tough row to hoe. To her credit, she quickly overcame her strong desire to score one for the men in blue, and our man walked free.