Saturday, March 10, 2012

A call to jury duty is an eye-opening experience

This week I was called up to jury duty. I would have to say it was a pretty interesting experience, although I wasn't actually seated on the jury. It was for an infant abuse-homicide case, and it turned out that they had called up about 90 potential jurors in order to seat ten (8 and 2 alternates.) I was in the third group of thirty.

We were all called in and watched a video explaining what jury duty was all about. Then we were sworn in before the next process occurred. Because the judge needed to sift through lots of potential jurors, we filled out about a fifteen page questionnaire about our feelings, attitudes, education, etc. etc. etc. It was a very introspective process. Happily, the jury was seated from the first two groups, and our group was excused by 5:00 the next day, so I didn't have to go through what I believe would have been a very painful process for me of learning about and accessing a tragic situation and passing  judgment on another human being.

Knowing that I could possibly have been on that jury has made me read about the case with a whole different set of eyes. Of course, reading bits and pieces from a court report is a lot different than being in the courtroom and seeing all the evidence, but it has made the case feel very real to me.

(This post was originally written and posted by me on my Sparkpeople blog on this same date)

1 comment:

  1. The verdict turned out to be guilty of a lesser charge, which was what I instinctively thought it should be as I read the newspaper reports of the trial.

    ReplyDelete