Just us...

So this past Monday, I dragged myself out of bed at o-dark-thirty so I could make it down to the court house by 8:30. I had jury duty, and not a year goes by that I don't. Because any Texan can request a jury-trial for anything, including parking tickets, this creates a ravening system that needs hot, fresh, open-minded jurors every day of every week of every year. And, despite my anti-societal stance on nearly everything, to my astonishment, I'm nearly always empaneled, voir dired, and often selected for the jury itself. I've sat on one criminal trial that lasted three days and, on the tiny side of things, I've been on a jury that decided the fine for a speeding ticket.

Every time I wind up in one of our courthouses here in Dallas, I have the same thoughts about the same things. I suppose this is because the things I brood about are things I don't have any answers for, and are probably unsolvable. Anything tangled up with legalities appears to me as the trickiest of mine fields, best to be avoided. I never get used to how long everything takes. Time in a courthouse appears to move at a maddening sludge-rate, so much court-house activity takes place in hallways, sitting and waiting, sitting and waiting. The cases I've sat on have been pending for several years, so when a judgment is rendered, it always strikes me as too little, too late or, conversely, too much, too late. Also, maybe it's my addiction to crime shows and murder mysteries, but I'm always struck by the artlessness of courtrooms: the bald-faced lies from witnesses, the naked ambition of prosecutors, the seedy avarice of criminal lawyers, and the transparent guilt of the defendants. I want to stage-manage everything and whisper, No, no, no! Don't look so shifty. No! Don't tell that terrible joke to soften us up! No! Stop it!

There are few lunch or potty breaks, and not many places you'd want to eat. Veterans like myself know to come equipped with a chunky paperback, money for the sticky vending machines, and lots of Nicorette gum. In honor of the low-techiness of it all, I brought a Tom Wolfe collection of essays about the 60's, and felt transported back to the day. Other than the occasional and frowned upon buzz of a cell phone, I bet not much has changed since then.

But the plus side of jury duty is us solid citizens. It's fun to be part of a randomly selected group...sort of like being in grade school again, or winding up in a community summer camp. This time, twenty-five of us were chosen and led into courtroom #3. We were, among other occupations there, a cafeteria food worker, a martial artist, an HR director, a corporate lawyer, a truck driver, a high school teacher, a disabled oil field worker, a truck loader, a defense lawyer, a medical researcher, a web designer and of course, me, a writer.

I thought that might be enough to bounce me out. On other voir dires, I've been asked if I write investigative pieces and while I generally and truthfully say no, I'm not a reporter, I can see the lawyers frown and scratch through my name. This time they appeared delighted. "And what do you write?" the defense lawyer asked me brightly. "Um," I said, trying remember some understandable things I've done, "I write screenplays, commercials for broadcast, and I ghost-write books." "Aha," the lawyer chirped, smiled broadly, and didn't take me off her clip-boarded list. And then we were all sent out into the hall, while the lawyers picked over us and puzzled out who they'd select.

I think of us jury-candidates as innocents abroad. We've been snatched from our daily lives, put into an environment none of us much like, and know very little about the processes there. I don't know if it works. There appears to be a frightening number of variables and too many unknowns. But I can testify from my time on various juries that we take our jobs very seriously, argue over minutae, and send our questions out to the judge time and time again. Somehow the right guy gets to be foreman and somehow we can agree on a verdict.

This time I was fairly sure I wouldn't be chosen. We were asked if we had anything against osteopaths or chiropractors, and my hand shot up. "An osteopath is a medical doctor," the judge admonished me. "I don't care," I said boldly, "I think they're quacks and I think chiropractors are quacks." And I do. It's a semi-informed bias, I guess, but a bias nonetheless. I knew I'd have trouble with chiropractic evidence should it be offered.

So, after we were dismissed to sit in the hall, I hunched over my book until an idea for a short story came to me. I pulled out one of my moleskin notebooks and scribbled furiously. The courtroom door opened and someone called, "Where's the writer?" "Over there," someone else said, "she's writing."