Fulfilling Civic Duty

I was on call for Jury Duty the week of March 10-14. In Los Angeles County what that entails is calling every evening (Sunday through Thursday), enter your juror number and a pin to find out if your group has to report to the jury pool the next day.

My first four phone calls resulted in me being told my the mechanical voice that I did not have to report for jury duty.

Of course, the last night, Thursday, I forgot to call until about 12:30am (when I was up trying to get Oliver to sleep (before sleep training)). And of course, as my luck would have it, I indeed had to report for jury duty the next day. At 7:45am.

In order to ‘report for jury duty’ a juror has to park his or her car at the Disney Concert Hall (usually on P7) and walk over to the assigned courthouse (in my case, the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center), about 5 blocks away. Then you have to wait in the incredibly long line to get through the metal detectors. Then you have to wait in the incredibly long line to get onto an elevator and make your way to the 11th floor.

Thankfully, I tend to be a bit anal about being on time (and I’m a very fast walker!) so I did make it to the 11th floor by 7:45am.

And then I waited.

And waited.

And waited (there was some direction-giving by various people during some of this time).

Finally, just before lunch (again, my luck), my name was called and I was told to report to the 13th floor, along with 54 other potential jurors, after lunch for jury selection.

So at 1:30pm, the other 54 detainees potential jurors and I report to the 13th floor to wait outside the appropriate courtroom (which they call “department”).

And we waited.

And we waited some more.

Then, finally at around 3pm, we were called into the courthouse, where the Judge Judy Wannabe informed us that she had another jury currently in deliberation in the Jury Room.  Because said jury was requesting some clarifications about the case they were deliberating, she could not begin our jury selection because she needed to attend to them. So instead of having us wait out in the hall to begin selection, she told us we could go home.

Until Monday morning.

Yes, even though she wasn’t going to use us and even though all of us had been on call all week, we still had to report back to begin the jury selection on Monday at 10:30am.

(A word about the wise use of time in our court system: they don’t use it wisely! We were instructed to report most every day at 10:30am, at which point we were typically made to wait until 10:45am, then we’d get down to business until 12:00pm, then be dismissed for lunch until 1:30pm, and then do business until 4pm. That 4 hours of productivity IF we actually started on time, which we normally didn’t!!! It was infuriating, at least on my part.)

When we reported back and after waiting out in the hallway, we were herded into the courtroom by the bailiff.

Jury selection consisted of the judge calling out twelve randomly assigned jurors (by the last 4 digits of our juror number) and asking them to sit in the jurors’ box. She then asked them a series of questions, including where they live, marital status, number of children, occupation of all adults living in the house, prior jury service and whether that service resulted in a verdict, and finally, any experiences of being a victim to or witnessing a crime.

Once those were done, she’d follow-up with case-specific questions which included the whether or not they or someone they know had personal experience with cocaine, whether or not they or someone they know had ever had a child removed due to allegations of child endangerment or abuse, and whether or not they or someone they know had worked for any crime enforcement agency.

She asked these questions of EVERY.SINGLE.POTENTIAL.JUROR.

Once she was done, the Prosecution and the two defense attorneys (there were two defendants, both with their own lawyer) went through their own series of questions, including the very annoying defense attorney who asked EVERY.SINGLE.POTENTIAL.JUROR. whether or not he/she was open to the idea that a law enforcement officer may lie when giving testimony.  Talk about giving away your game plan.

After the lawyers were done, the judge would alternate and give each side (of which there were three) the opportunity to excuse a potential juror.

When a potential juror was excused, a new potential juror was called from the pool and the questioning started again.

This repeated FIFTY THREE times!

Guess who sat through FIFTY TWO (two and a three-quarter days!) of this and was selected on the FIFTY THIRD time?

Yes, ME!

But just in case you think, “Oh good, at least there will be something productive that comes out of this for you Frank.”

Oh no! I was chosen to be Alternate Juror #1 (of 1).

So after sitting through the juror selection and then just over two days of opening arguments, testimony, and closing arguments, my role in the grand scheme of things: to sit in the hall while the jury deliberates the case.

How’s that for fulfilling civic duty? (At least I fulfilled my civic duty, even if it wasn’t fulfilling civic duty.)