That was the longest Jury Duty I have ever had. I was there from just before 8AM thru 10:15AM.
I spent 1/2 hour of that time trying to get a Sprint Wireless card working. I must be getting old b/c I could have sworn I used this device on the same notebook a couple of weeks ago.
Jury duty is also very expensive. Unpaid time off, no parking lot provided, opportunity cost... They did pay me. $6 for the day plus $2.52 for the 36 mile drive (as calculated from the center of my zip code). I netted $3.27 after paying $5.25 for parking.
It sounds like I'm complaining, but I don't mean to. I'm happy to serve & I hope karma will repay me for that if I'm ever falsely accused. I was almost disappointed that I wasn't selected as a juror.
2 comments:
Though I've "done my time" sitting in wait plenty of times, I've only actually served on a jury once. I'm glad I did and think everyone should have that experience at least once. However, it was a circumstantial evidence murder trial...not fun to listen to nor to see things one likes to think doesn't and shouldn't happen. Jury interactions are of course "interesting" with all walks of life and life backgrounds seeing/hearing things differently. Interesting group dynamics to say the least. We had the choice of guilty between a lesser or greater charge or not guilty. 11 of us ultimately thought the greater after much debate. One hold-out wouldn't do that because in her mind, drugs kill and the gal that had been killed had a small amount of drugs in her system so she couldn't reach a conclusion that the guy had actually beat her to death in spite of what all we'd heard and seen. The rest of us refused to be "hung" and were afraid to let it go to another jury and compromised on guilty of the lesser charge out of concern that the next jury might not fair as well as we did and this guy might get off entirely. I was okay with that until after the trial out in the hall; a few of us had questions we asked the prosecutors afterwards and meanwhile as the cuffed accused came out of the courtroom, he comes out creepy elated thanking us profusely for finding him guilty of the lesser charge in a manner conveying it should have been the higher charge and also kinda of creepy threatening like he might come looking for us! I KNEW to the core we'd errored in not prevailing on the greater charge by his behavior yet also was fearful that the next jury might not have achieved as much as we did. I was haunted in my dreams for months about things heard/seen during that trial, and worried about him being back on the streets in short duration. In the scheme of things, I KNOW we'd never get that one juror to change her way of thinking so I think we did the right thing but to this day it bugs me we couldn't convict at the higher charge. That's MY experience with being a juror. The pay is a joke...but the way I see it, it is our responsibility as citizens of this nation to be jurors when called upon. If I was charged with something, I'd want someone like me on the jury. I like to think that I listened with an open mind and carefully weighed the evidence in the manner instructed by the judge. /sjw
That certainly stinks to hear how happy the weasel was acting... hopefully you just misread him. I think that as a society, we have to accept that some guilty persons are let off easy (or altogether) in exchange for NOT punishing the innocent.
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