Jury Duty

Until recently, I equated jury duty to an episode of "Boston Legal."

My grandiose idea included getting picked for an exciting case, one sure to set the precedent for the justice system for the next 50 years. Finally, the opportunity to fulfill my civic duty!

I envisioned a buxom, blonde prosecuting attorney fresh from Harvard sashaying around the court stringing words together like Matt Damon in The Rainmaker, not only swaying our minds but (sigh) touching our hearts.

The defense attorney — a vindictive, unshaven man who wears a suit coat with patches on the elbows — fumbles with paperwork, trips over his lies and although you almost feel sorry for the poor bastard, the decision for the jury is easy: guilty! Justice is served.

And, of course, parking is validated.

Jury duty is nothing like this. You receive a jury summons in the mail four weeks before you are to appear in court. You arrive at the courthouse promptly at 7:45 a.m., and are herded into a large room with 400 other cattle. From those 400, 48 unfortunate souls are selected to sit in on four trials. I guess I wasn't wearing my lucky boxers that day.

Doing jury duty grants a citizen a small view of the overly hairy underbelly of our society, and it's not the heroic picture painted by television. Most of your time is spent sitting awkwardly on a church pew outside of the courtroom, waiting for, well... waiting for something.

The attorneys? They barely knew their clients names.

And these are real criminals. They've committed real crimes.

I've known people who were on jury duty before me. "You'll be out in under a day!" they said. "It's like a vacation day!" they proclaimed.

Their cases were simple: minor in possession of alcohol, land dispute, broken contract. Mine wasn't that simple. I sat on a jury for a defendant that was being charged with three counts of criminal sexual misconduct. Like the rest, I tried to talk my way out of sitting on the jury.

After the lanky prosecuting attorney asked me a series of questions checking for a bias — and there was a bias — she ended with, "If you were the defendant, would you want to have you as a juror?"

I responded, loud and clear: "No."

She smiled.

One hour later, I was listening to testimony in the case. James Spader, Freddie Prinze Jr and William Shatner each failed to show up to try the case. On the fourth floor, in a corner courtroom that hadn't changed its decor since 1973, I sat for four days. While Ron Burgundy might be a fan of rich mahogany, I think he's the only one.

The trial process was not smooth.

During the course of our stay, the justice took seven breaks a day on average. An avid smoker, she needed her nicotine fix. By the end of the fourth day, she'd developed a hacking cough.

Other than the trial, the jury watched a courtroom deputy raise his middle finger to his buddy, listened to the court clerk take numerous personal phone calls and....

And when it was time to deliberate, it was anything but 12 Angry Men.

Henry Fonda? Wasn't in my jury room.

Instead, a thinly mustachioed man announced quickly that the defendant had to be guilty.

I told him we hadn't even begun to discuss what facts had been presented.

"Well," he muttered, "we need to make the verdict quick. They're buying us lunch at work tomorrow."

A portly woman wearing a teddy bear sweatshirt, flipping through an issue of O, explained that she'd be our jury foreman because she could "move this shit along."

Did we know without a doubt the defendant's innocence or guilt? I knew that some guy with a handlebar mustache wanted a free lunch from his work.

We made a decision in 30 minutes.

A jury of this defendant's peers, sitting in a room the size of a hall closet presented our verdict to an empty courtroom with very little glamour, very little concern and very little emotion.

Jury duty, my mom tells me, is good experience for everybody.

"Good experience for what?" I ask.

For $15 a day, you sit and listen to someone's private matters put on display. In the end, I left feeling hollow. No one wanted to be there. Did we make the right decision? Did anyone care if they made the right decision? We received 10 minutes of training. Like a fast food joint, they shipped everybody in, and shipped everybody out, quick as possible, with a gentle pat on the back.

"Thanks for coming! Enjoy your Whopper!"

"And by the way, thanks for your verdict, juror number 8!"

— David Bonkosky (daverox4 at hotmail dot com)

— graphic by Benjamin Chandler (blchandler at sbcglobal dot net)