Scenes from Jury Duty, Part 2

by Jeff, guest blogger

Second in the series from the courthouse...

Once Attila, the snippy clerk of the jury pool finishes with the 65 people who cannot apparently read, listen or pay attention in any language to her instruction, we are down to about 200 hardy souls.

And we get our first break. Thank goodness, we'd accomplished about 10 minutes worth of substance so clearly, a break was in order. And most of that was instructing jurors about detaching their juror badges along the perforations AND putting them face forward into the plastic name badges.

Gave me a chance to pursue a Diet Coke and watch sheriffs restrain some lady who was mad at the sheriff for taking some guy off in handcuffs. Or maybe she was mad at the guy in handcuffs. Hard to tell. As a badged juror, I am persona non grata, and a sheriff told us jurors to 'move on'. But the yelling lady was loud and mad. And not afraid of the sheriffs. She could have taken two or three of them if she'd had a mind to.

Once safely back in the confines of the jury room, break over. Attila goes over the jury questionnaire with us. Helping us with the hard questions posed by the Superior Court to all jurors. Questions like your name, date of birth and can you speak English. This elicits about 10 questions from the jury pool indicating no one is listening. One fellow seriously asks twice what time will we be done today. Attila growls at the jury pool and reminds everyone that she is in charge. And when we get to the "are you a convicted felon" question, about 10 hands in the room go up, so she tells the questioners to 'line up' so she can take the questions one at a time semi-privately.

Apparently, judges are clamoring for jurors, but at 10:50 a.m., we don't seem to be in any hurry to actually go anywhere. Oh and Attila reminded us we are encouraged to donate our $15 per day and $0.34 per mile (one way) back to the courts so that they can continue to offer the fine accommodations like the ones we are currently enjoying.

I can't make stuff up this good...