Say I was out on jury duty, hypothetically speaking, these might be some of my thoughts:
I would wanna get picked. I would feel like I had good answers to the questions – Engineer at Yahoo! Sports (might even wear a DRAFT ME shirt); my wife is currently on materity leave taking care of my son who will be 4 weeks old tomorrow (thank you, thank you); my sister is a great criminal defense attorney (wink at defendant); my father has been sued cause his dogs attack/kill neighborhood pets (I know, I know…); my brother had his car broken into 3 weeks ago (over in that slum, Cupertino – I tell him to save up so he can move out of there, but does he listen to me).
They wouldn’t have to go through the questionaire for me – my answer would be ready in essay form cause it takes so long to get through some of the other potential jurors. Do you have a partner? What is their occupation? Do you have children? What are their ages?
Like these are surprise questions and the person never knew they’d get asked. Except for the fact that the questions are all on that piece of paper in their hands. And that the same questions were asked of the person sitting right next to you.
Anyway – though I thought my answers were fun, if I was in jury duty, I might learn somethings about our other residents – like that there’s been a lot of people who have been buglarized, and that 3 out of 18 people have DUI’s (one case just closed last week…) and that some of us have brothers who have been up for murder but got off with assult (their 3rd assult as a matter of fact) and that others of us have sisters who have ex-husbands who are doing time for murder. And maybe the guy that works as a Porche mechanic has reckless driving on his record from 10 years ago. But no one holds any grudges against the police. And maybe that incident with the police turned the Porche mechanic’s life around. Maybe not. Who can tell?
You might think this would be interesting enough to keep me awake. I would hope so, but it would probably still be a struggle.
If I don’t get picked, hypothetically, I might goto the opening day of the case anyway, since if I was in the jury selection process and had spent so much time around the case, I might want to see the victim testify, just so I could go and make a snap judgement before lunch.
It is odd, hearing a guy say “not to be judgemental” all the time, when his official title is Judge.
I was the first one kicked off — amazingly, over a really scary guy who wore a bungy cord to keep his pants together (gap visible) and called himself an urban survivalist. I think what got me kicked off was my answer to what I would teach my children — that was fiscal responsibility (everyone else said teach them how to love, or honor, or some japanese movie type thing like that). I don’t think that should have characterized me as a freak though.