We the Jury

Every time I received the green and white mimographed notice in the mail, I immediately think of excuses: vacation, travel, financial hardship, dead relative, a Nostradomic vision of major castastrophe. Usually vacation is enough to postpone jury duty indefinitely, but with the backed-up courts in Baltimore City, the Jury Commissioner has gotten smart. No longer is sending the summons back with your excuse sufficient for postponement; now, you must call in and reschedule your jury duty date. Having rescheduled mine to late August back in May, the particular day came up like a sudden sour scent of a milk jug that's worked its way unnoticeably to the back of the fridge.

But I digress.

Jury dury isn't the Draconian torture they make it out to be. Sure, you're on edge all day waiting for your lot to be called into a court room and for some lawyers to decide whether you, as a jury member, will further or hinder their cause, but usually it's a day of reading in a somewhat-crowded room not getting picked for a trial.

I spent half a day of reading (most of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and six of Nine Stories by JD Salinger, one of my favorites) and munching on combos before getting selected for a trial. Monday afternoon and Tuesday monrning were spent listening and deliberating a rather weak case of car theft. I rather enjoyed my service, mostly because it was short but also because we contributed to a fair and just system, "the worst system that's better than anyone else's," as one jaded court employee explained to me on the way into the Clarence Mitchell Court Building.

Pluses of jury duty included the diversity of our juror pool, mostly working-class black woman who were particularly affected (and disgusted) by the legions of black trash drug culture particpants in the city. They told story after story of someone they knew (sometimes even their son or daughter) who was lured by the promise of easy living and had eventually been tripped up by the legal system or a bullet. They didn't understand how people could not want to put in a full day's work to their names and establish themselves or, at the very least, invest the illegal money into something other than trashy clothes and cars and material possessions say perhaps a community or a house. They refused to support, even if it was their own flesh and blood, these leeches of the system, to the point where one woman did not even visit her son in jail because, in her words, "he didn't have time for me when he was out running on the streets---why should I give him my time now that he's locked up? I go when I want to see him, not because I have to." More power to you, lady. Maybe these women should be running our country instead of the slimebacks we've got now.

Minuses of jury duty included stink. I'd forgotten that most people like to eat at McDonald's for lunch and, when two o'clock rolled around, much burping and farting of onion and fetid meat permeated the air. I hate the smell of decay. Minuses also included 10- and 12-dollar parking fees for a day/half-day of parking when you only get $15 a day. Will I have to learn the dreaded bus system before my next jury duty summons rolls around?

Nah. There'll always be another vacation, travel, financial hardship, dead relative, or Nostradomic vision of major castastrophe to help weasel my way out indefinitely.