Jury Duty

Originally published May 17, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1174

So there I was, sitting on the jury on a capital murder case, looking into the eyes of the defendant. He looked troubled, frightened. And then, as I was listening with only one ear, I suddenly became alert. Hold it. The FBI agent had just said something that didn’t make sense. Applying quick deductions, I realized it placed him at the murder scene during the time that he claimed he was across town. Why would he lie unless…?

I waited for the defense attorney to pounce on it, but he just sat there, complacent, dazed. I realized that he really believed that his client had done it.

I leaped to my feet. “J’accuse!” I shouted, pointing with a trembling finger.

The agent realized the jig was up. He vaulted the rail of the witness stand, grabbed the court clerk and put a gun to the panicked woman’s head. “Anybody moves, she gets it!”

I was poised on the balls of my feet, waiting for an opportunity, waiting, waiting…

The waiting was driving me nuts.

My Star Trek uniform left securely hanging in the closet, I reported for Jury Duty as per my summons, my civic responsibility, and my awareness that circumstances could have been a lot worse.

Originally I’d been called in January… in Brooklyn. Brooklyn would have been a two hour shlep. But I was unavailable in January, up in Montreal for the filming of Space Cases. So I got a postponement (getting “out of it” completely was pretty much impossible; it was for Federal Court, where the usual sob stories will simply get you, “That’s nice; now be here.”) My name was tossed back into the jury pool and when it came up again for April 15 (as if taxes that day weren’t enough), I’d been relocated to the more convenient Nassau county. Although Nassau the Bahamas would have been even better.

I’d called an assigned 800 number first thing in the morning, as I’d been instructed to do in the initial summons, to check whether I would be needed at all. The recording said, “Due to the settling of several cases, we will be needing fewer jurors than previously anticipated. Therefore, anyone whose last name begins with the letter A through G…”

This sounds promising, I thought.

“…is to report for jury duty. All others should call back Wednesday.”

It was like finding out every other school had a snow day except you.

Make no mistake… I’d always wanted to serve on a jury. I thought it would be an interesting experience, particularly if it’s a stimulating case. Unfortunately, I am (a) self-employed and (b) juggling five deadlines, so the timing was not great. Still… civic duty is civic duty and all that. Hey… maybe I’d get on a First Amendment case.

This was the first time that I’d ever been summoned for jury duty, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I showed up with my computer bag. The security guards ran it through a fluoroscope, cracked it open and pulled out a camera that had been left over from when I’d brought the bag along on a recent vacation. I’d forgotten it was in there, and wasn’t aware there was a problem in any event.

The guard held it up in front of my face as if he’d found five kilos of crack.  He said, “This is a felony.”

I thought, No, it’s a Konica. Hey, have you heard my idea for a holiday ad campaign? “Give a Konica… for Chanukah.” But somehow this didn’t seem to be the appropriate time. So instead I simply said, “Oh?”

He pointed to a sign unobtrusively off to one side on a small piece of paper… as opposed to, say, the humongous “No weapons!” signs you see at airports. The sign said that no recording devices were allowed, although the “F” word wasn’t mentioned.

A felony. I could just see me in Federal lockup. “Hi. I’m Peter.”

“I’m the Unabomber. What are you in for?”

“Camera in a court building.”

“Whoa. Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

So the guard stood there, holding the camera and said, “Do you want to put this back in your car, or just leave it here and you can pick it up later?”

I thought of saying, How about if I swallow it and then take secret pictures through my navel. Again uncommon wisdom prevailed, and I simply shrugged and said, “Fine. You keep it.” I wonder if they took pictures of each other.

There were two lengthy lines for jury check in, with dedicated civil servants processing people through. They seemed to be spending much of their time telling people, after lengthy waits, that they were standing in the wrong line; the right hand line was for A-C, the left hand line was for D-G. Not that they bothered to announce it until after you’d waited. Or perhaps they couldn’t find a scrap of paper small enough to write a sign on.

Then we went into the jury waiting room, where a fellow with a thick Italian accent–not quite up there with Chico Marx or Lord John Whorfin, but getting there–explained the ins and outs of what was expected. He dwelt endlessly on the $40 we’d be receiving for every day we were there; mentioned it at least twenty times, by my count. Then they began calling names for people to be brought up to a courtroom for jury selection. There were well over a hundred people in the room, and my name was the third one called. This didn’t look to be my day.

They brought us up to a magistrate courtroom and packed us in on three long benches. I was in the back row, dead center. Up on the left was the jury box, to the right the judge’s bench. I was not looking forward to having my name called to be brought up to the jury box. Being smack in the middle, I was going to have to climb over a lot of people to get out.

After the judge entered, he described the case to us in broad strokes: As near as I could tell, it was about a guy accused of selling fraudulent airline tickets. Plus, since he’d mailed the tickets, he’d also allegedly misused the US mails.  We were told the trial would take at least two weeks, which was mildly distressing since Chico Marx downstairs had said the average trial was three days. And the case sure didn’t sound glamorous.

Rolling a wooden drum that had all our names in it, the court clerk called twelve people up to the jury box for “voir dire,” the procedure in which questions are asked to see whether the potential juror is acceptable to all concerned. None of them was me.

In the questioning, I quickly noticed a pattern. The beliefs of the individual jurors did not seem to matter, nor did what they said. Any government employee was immediately tossed, no matter how unrelated to the subject at hand. For example, there was a guy who had worked twenty years for the Environmental Protection Agency. He was asked if his working for the government would make him more likely to render a judgment against the defendant. “Absolutely not,” he replied with utter conviction and forcefulness. He was then asked if, on the other hand, his long connection with the government would make him more likely to vote against the government’s case. “Absolutely not,” he repeated. Clearly there was no doubt whatsoever in this clearly educated, intelligent man’s mind that he could decide the matter fairly and impartially.

A minute later, he was gone.

There was a man who was a vice president of an insurance company.

Gone.

Several people had served on several juries in the past, and had had no trouble rendering verdicts in those previous cases.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Anyone with experience, gone. Anyone who looked at all well-to-do, gone. Anyone with any connection, no matter how remote, to law enforcement, the postal service, the airlines, or the legal system, gone. Didn’t matter how certain they were that they could be impartial. They were tossed. It made you begin to wonder why they were bothering to ask the jurors about their state of mind. Apparently no one believed them.

Good heavens, how are we supposed to believe what these people say about the affairs of utter strangers when we don’t even believe what they say about themselves.

There was one woman who, I must admit, I got a kick out of. She had a son and daughter in law who were cops. The judge, in asking questions, said, “Would you be inclined to give added weight to the testimony of law enforcement officials because of your own ties to the police force?”

The woman said, “No.”

The judge said, “Just to be sure, let me put it another way… would you be likelier to automatically believe what a law enforcement official says, since your own son is a law enforcement official?”

She seemed to stare at him for a moment, uncertain why he was asking again. And then a little light appeared to go off in her head as she realized she was being given a “get out of jury duty free” card. “Yes,” she said quickly.

“You’re saying you’d be more likely to believe him.”

“Yes,” she said, even faster.

She was vapor mist.

Particularly early on in the going, they went through jurors like buzz saws, separating the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, the wheat was being tossed out the door. I started to be able to guess who was going to go: Anyone with any life, with any spark. One guy I remember in particular stared vacantly, nodded, murmured his answers. He was picked for the jury.

They did get a few folks with some clear intelligence to them as they went further into the jury selection—presumably because the lawyers had been using up their peremptory challenges.

I sat there, waiting to be called. They called up the people to my left, to my right, jurors being dismissed, new jurors being called up. I felt like a trooper watching his buddies go down in flames while remaining unscathed himself.

Finally they had their 12 jurors and two alternates. In order to get these 14 people, they had interviewed a total of 42 potential jurors. Only eight people had wound up sitting there for three hours without being brought up for voir dire.

I was one of the eight. Here I’d been worried about having to climb over others on the bench, instead, it was now completely empty. I was the sole occupant. I studied the jury. Most of them I wouldn’t trust to give me accurate directions to the Southern State Parkway, much less render an decision on my fate.

They sent us back to the jury waiting room, and there I cooled my heels for the rest of the day. I wrote a plot for Aquaman as they kept us there just long enough for the rush hour to be in full force—at which point they let us go with the admonition that we were to call in during the week to see if we were needed.

We weren’t.

The following Monday it started all over again. Reported for jury duty. Sat in the jury waiting room as they called names.

Apparently I had been surrounded by a shield of invulnerability, carried over from the previous week. This time, out of the hundred or so jurors who were in the jury waiting room, they called out the names of about 80 people to be considered for serving on a jury. They missed me completely. I never even got out of the waiting room.

I wrote an issue of The Incredible Hulk, sat and fantasized about what it would be like to serve on a jury, and got sent home as soon as rush hour was underway.

And that was that. I never got put into the box, never got questioned. I saw a lot of intelligent, educated people discarded in favor of—with few exceptions—folks with vacuous stares and monosyllabic answers.

And I think about the comment a comedian made: The trouble with the jury system is that your life is in the hands of people who were so dumb they couldn’t get out of jury duty.

Still, as John Milton said, “They also serve who only stand and wait,” in a work called On His Blindness. And justice, after all, is blind.

Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.