Jury service # 3

Well, I’m a juror. On a real live trial. Since Thursday. During the third morning in the jury assembly room my name was called out. 50 of us were then escorted to a court room where we sat down the back and waited for a second ballot (using the same spinning wooden box with names drawn at random). My name was called out 8th … I began the walk, as I’d seen the others do, from the seats at the back to the jury box while the lawyers scrambled through sheets of names to look up my address and occupation and shout out ‘challenge’ if they didn’t like what they saw on the sheet or who they saw walking towards the jury box. Alas, they did not challenge me. So I’m a juror.

Obviously I can say nothing about the case especially as it’s not yet over. It’s scheduled to be a few days long. However I can say that it is one of the more surreal experiences I’ve had. All of a sudden I’m whisked away from the normal life I know to this life of small windowless rooms full of people who are supposedly my peers who I don’t know and have never seen before, listening to people I’ve never heard speak, on topics I knew existed but never thought I would ever hear about in the flesh and blood, drinking water out of polestyrene cups and eating Griffin’s Krispies. While I sit there (with my open mind) it seems sometimes like being in a movie and sometimes not. I don’t know what to expect at each turn, which is fairly freaky for me. On the day the jury deliberates we are not allowed to be out of each other’s company, even if that means spending night in a hotel.

So life is fairly strange right now. I see all the images of the trial in my head, constantly, yet I walk around as though everything is normal and I speak of it to no one. It’s my civic duty.