Trail by Jury Selection

A couple weeks ago I was privileged to serve Sacramento County as a juror.  Not a rural juror, but a regular juror (insert 30 Rock comment here).  After an hour or so in a waiting room, I was selected to be one of the 30 jurors cattle-called into the court room.  What followed was 6 hours of waiting to see if I'd be on the jury of an attempted murder case.  It was nail-biting anxiety.

I tried thinking of ways to avoid jury duty.  Most of them involved saying or doing things that border on the ridiculous or the offensive: phrenology ("He had the temple and eyebrow slope of a killer, he did!"), comments about racial hygiene ("You know, as I was reading in My Struggle..."), twitching or shouting things uncontrollably, possibly in German or Finnish, or dressing up as a celebrity - I was thinking of (bondage) Princess Leia or David Bowie (anatomically correct from the Labyrinth movie).  In the end, after considering that my comments would be under oath and in public records, and after an unfortunate experience with a home waxing kit and prosthetics, I decided to go radical liberal and talk about Scandinavian prison sentences should they ask.  For example, you can't be charged with a crime until age 15 and they really won't throw you in prison until your early 20s.  Or that a life sentence is something around 12 years.  I figured that would get a prosecutor to "thank and excuse" me.

When it was all said and done, and I didn't get called to be on the jury, I thought it was an interesting experience.  I don't want to do it ever again, even if it were a B list celebrity as the defendant.  But now I can say I've done my civic duty and share the pain with others who get called up.  And write an awesome blog post, too.

If you don't talk to your Finnish child about crime, it doesn't really matter because they won't be criminally responsible until age 15.  Have fun, kids!