Doing Time in the Jury Pool

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Dear Mom & Dad,

Everyone here in Houston was called for jury duty, but me and it's got me wondering. Is it because the powers that be are just working their way to me? Or could it be a sort of special pass by Fate because I'm the only one who had to do time in the jury pool in New Orleans?

I don't know what jury duty is like there now, in the post-Katrina world, but back then, well, I'd sooner have been buried up to my neck in the sand with honey poured over my head.

Here, jury duty was one day, unless you got seated on a jury.

There, it was ONE, WHOLE MONTH of coming in two days a week. You had to accrue fourteen days of jury "credit" before you could be released for a couple of years. You were either on the Monday/Wednesday rotation or the Tuesday/Thursday rotation. And if you served on a jury (which didn't release you), you only got "credit" for the days when the jury time fell on "your" days. Any Friday service didn't count toward either group.

I was on a special, both double days, rotation cycle, because I had a trip planned, so I did my time for two weeks. I had to show up at eight-thirty, four days a week, even though the stinking judges drifted in after nine--and some didn't even start calling their juries up until lunchtime. That one would then make us sit in his Ice Station Zebra courtroom while HE went and had lunch. Punk.

The courtrooms were nothing like on television. One judge had piles and piles of soft drinks stacked around his desk, probably because his was the coldest room in the building.

The hallways weren't air conditioned, neither was the jury room. So we'd go from hot and muggy (did I mention this was August?) to near freezing.

The jury room was...beyond lame. A sad little room at street level with a couple of vending machines and not enough chairs from the miserable good citizens who didn't throw their jury summons in the trash. We were treated more like criminals than the criminals.

Do I sound bitter? Because I want to sound bitter.

Some of the jurors were...interesting. One said she it wasn't right for her to judge anyone and anyway, how could anyone know what happened if they didn't see it. Clearly someone who didn't watch any of the CSI shows or Law and Order. Or made it to the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

I almost got called to one jury. It was a murder trial, a mother and child. When I said, yeah, I could vote for the death penalty for the guy, the judge came to life and looked at me with he probably thought was a piercing gaze.

"You would vote for the death penalty?"

Maybe he figured a woman wouldn't have the guts or something.

I pierced him back with my gaze. "For murdering a child? Oh yeah."

I was excused.

I hear that they just turned all the prisoners in jail loose before the storm. I think most of them are here in Houston now. If I do get summoned here, maybe I'll see them in court--and they better hope I'm not in the oh-dark-hundred group.

Because that would make me bitter.

Love,