Trial by Jury, Part II

Mercifully, Hollywood opted NOT to inflict a second installment of Pauly Shore's crapfest acting opus, "Jury Duty," on us. I, however, have chosen to give you a follow up to my last post on my fun in the jury pool.

Once we fled Arizona for Nirvana north of San Diego, it seemed like the stunningly patient and mighty fine SML and I got jury duty notices with alarming regularity.  This is where I was introduced to professional jurors. These are, for the most part, elderly people with nothing better to do than hang out at the local Courthouse, hoping to fill in for all the prospective jurors who elect to skip out on their summons.  It was also in SoCal where I ran into maniacs who would stop at nothing to get out of jury duty a la Liz Lemon from "30 Rock:"

The costume didn't work for Liz and similar shenanigans failed for some of the prospective jurors I ran into on multiple occasions.  It was on my last summons that I found myself unable to get out of my civic duty and I was selected to serve on a jury.

In spite of my pronounced desire to NOT be there, once I was picked, I took my role as a juror seriously.  You don't grow up the son of a highly-respected trial attorney without respecting the legal process.  I wish my fellow jurors had taken the case a tad more seriously.  It was a criminal case, involving charges of police brutality and questionable immigration status.  Anyway, the juror next to me spent the bulk of the trial downloading porn to his cell phone.  Nice.  The other jurors, a mishmash of the aforementioned professional jurors and a few people who were more concerned about where they would be going for lunch, seemed pretty much disconnected from it all.

I made the mistake of taking notes.  I made the mistake of noting that when the Spanish-speaking mother of one of the accused was speaking that the court-appointed translator incorrectly interpreted what she said. Why mistakes? Because when the case was handed over to the jury, guess who was made foreman unanimously?  Me, good readers, me.  Fantastic.

When one of my professional jurors announced, with more pride than she should have, that every jury she'd ever been in had ended in a mistrial because she was always the lone hold out, I knew things were going to be interesting. When she said that, I looked at her, and said simply, "Ma'am,that will not be the case with this jury." So we deliberated for a day and a half.  This was no "Twelve Angry Men" but our deliberations had there moments.  I am delighted to report that we reached unanimous verdicts on all of the counts.  We did our work.  Civic duty done.

A funny thing happened the day after we delivered our verdict.  Since I'd been in the trial all week and working at night to not be completely buried at work, we took the kids to the San Diego Zoo.  As we walked around that animal jail (I'm not a fan), lo and behold, we run into my professional juror lady.  Her husband pulled me aside and said, "She's been on a lot of juries and she says you're the best foreman she's ever worked with."

So, I guess that was a good thing? Now we wait - wait for the summons here.  Who knows what lurks in the jury pool here...

Trial by Jury

Please, no.

It struck me the other day that as new residents of this corner of New England that a jury duty summons can't be far away.  This thought does not make me want to make a beeline for the mailbox every day to see if the summons has arrived. Rather, it makes me want to curl up into the fetal position and weep uncontrollably.

I should feel like serving on a jury is an honor.  In my experience, it is not.  It is, instead, a parade of the damned and that's just the collection of society's flotsam and jetsam in the jury selection room.

When we lived in the barren wasteland that is Arizona, I got called to jury duty with disturbing regularity.  I almost always managed to get out of it.  My best excuse was to simply mention that I was my father's eldest son.  My late father was a pretty well known attorney who had done much to champion legal ethics and attorneys and judges knew who he was.  That typically got me out.  Also, saying that the defending attorney was so attractive that I would not be able to focus on the trial worked once.  Although that nearly got me a psych referral because said attorney looked like the sister of JoJo, the dog-faced boy.

It was while were in Arizona that I was selected for my first jury.  I did all I could to get out of it, to no avail.  Here's the skinny on that case (and beware, it's going to get unpleasant) - it was a civil case, involving an injury on a worksite. As the case was being explained to us, the prospective jurors, we learned that it was a most delicate injury.  A cement truck driver was delivering cement to a site and, long story short, he'd gotten out of his truck and jumped over an area where cement was being poured.  He slipped, or something, and was impaled on a piece of rebar.  Said rebar penetrated one of his testicles and kept on going up through his abdomen.  Can I get an OUCH!? Suffice to say, he was a mess.  The instant the defense attorney described the injury, every single of us men in the room, slammed our knees together and gasped audibly.  I hadn't even been selected yet for the jury and I was already prepared to award this poor soul $10Million for pain and suffering.  The wife was suing for, well, loss of services.  So this case was going to be a good time all around.  Until two yentas in the jury pool started asking about workmen's comp. The judge had made it clear that this case NOT about workmen's comp.  This mattered not an iota to these two idiots.  They kept asking questions about the intricacies of workmen's comp and they kept being admonished by the judge to shut it, basically.  This led to a couple of other prospective jurors asking aloud about the comp issue.  At this point, the judge called for a recess, asking the attorneys to follow him.  I knew this wasn't going to end well.

It didn't.  A very irritated judge returned to the bench and announced that he was declaring a mistrial before the trial had even begun.  Laying the blame squarely at the feet of the two women who would not shut up, he said he had no choice but to declare a mistrial because of their actions.  The poor plaintiff and his wife were crestfallen.  They'd waited so long to get to trial and now it was time to set the clock back.  I feel quite certain that if the judge could have ordered the summary execution of the workmen's comp yentas, we would have seen them eviscerated.  That would have been a powerful lesson to foolish jurors everywhere.

That would not be my last jury.  I would get a chance to serve again.  This time in California.  That's a story for another post.

Preparate

As a missionary in Miami in the mid-1980's, I had the opportunity to get know many Latin cultures, but I felt a particular affinity for the Cubans.  Perhaps that's because they essentially ran Miami as a northern suburb of Havana (which, let's face it, it is) or maybe it's because their preferred method of cleaning the house was to simply bring in a hose from the backyard and spray down every last bit of the plastic-encased furniture and formica sculptures, but I digress.  A common refrain I heard from Cuban brothers and sisters on cleaning days, as well as pretty much any day, was 'Preparate!,' loosely meaning 'Get ready.'

I thought about that one word command a lot today as the stunningly patient and mighty fine SML and I made our way to the nearest big box hardware emporium to buy this:

The latest addition to our garage

Yes, we are the proud new owners of a Troy-Bilt 7,000 watt generator. Jealous?  Don't be.  This surrender to Mother Nature purchase means we really or that we will really need something like this.  Last year, before moving to this fine little corner of New England, they bore the brunt of a brutal, weird storm in October.  Our neighborhood was without power for 10, count 'em, 10 days.  Now if you're keeping score, you know that for the six years that we lived in Chicago, we never put a backup battery on our ancient sump pump. This meant that we spent each and every storm praying, sacrificing goats, doing whatever it took to make sure that thing kept running and that our basement did not turn into an open sewer.  By some miracle, it worked.  This time, though, we've decided not to play those odds.

Now we live in the sticks.  It's not like we can just run down the street to get a few things in the event of a power outage.  No, if we lose power for a day, let alone days on end, we will  have to fend for ourselves.  So adding the generator makes the spectre of living 'Little Hell House in the Prairie' just a little easier. Now to figure out how to work the thing...

I couldn't help thinking about the many lessons in Church over the years about the need to be prepared and living providently.  It is wise counsel. It's made us a bit of a peculiar people and not especially popular with movers. There's always an ugly moan when they see the boxes of food storage.  I for one hope that we never have to break into that stuff but if we do, I know we'll get by.  Oh the things we'll do with ground wheat!

Just a little bit off

It was a good weekend with the stunningly patient and mighty fine SML and the Boy.  We didn't do anything especially exciting, but it was good to relax.  Really good as a matter of fact.

That said, though, I woke up yesterday feeling just a little bit off.  Not physically, but just a little off.  By midday, that off feeling was beginning to feel a bit like foreboding.  I could not put my finger on that sense, nor could I shake it.  It was more than a little strange.  Even stranger was the moment at Church when the speaker less than subtly declared we should vote for Mitt because of his charitable behavior.  I'm sure this thrilled the Mittites but I think that may have been some of the source of my foreboding.

Then today two of my children Tweeted about their weeks starting off in a way that suggests it is going to be a rough week for each of them.  I think that's where my sense of being just a bit off was coming from.  I hope I'm still in synch with them as they continue to grow up.  I hope that never goes away.