Jury Duty
Well, Jury Duty is something I’ve always wanted to do. It just sound like a cool thing to get to do. You watch all the movies that have court cases involved and figure that if you ever got the chance to do Jury Duty you just know you would get on a really cool case and get to spend ages deliberating over all the evidence, not reaching a verdict so going to the pub for lunch and then coming back later on and finally reaching the verdict you think is fair. Then you secretly hope to be the person who gets asked by the judge if the jury has reached a verdict (well you do if you’re me) and then you get to dispense justice and send the bastard down and give a victory for the little guy.
Wel that’s the image I had when I got the letter through informing me that I had been selected for jury duty. Filled in saying I could accept and looked forward to my two weeks off of work dispensing justice Steve-Style.
I wasn’t even put off by the fact that I would be starting jury duty on my birthday as I just wanted to do it and see what it was like.
To be honest I would rather had gone to work as jury duty, well my experience of it anyway, is just a complete pile of shite. I got to be on once case in the first week, and that included spending five hours sat around doing sod all on the Monday, yeah just how I planed on spending my birthday thanks. Then got on the case and only sat there for a few hours before getting to go home for the day about half 4.
Still, I looked forward to the next day as I knew I was on a jury and wouldnt have to wait around for ages again and could hope that the case started getting interesting. Well that all got screwed up as soon as we got in court. Someone had asked to be excused from the jury for some reason and as that meant that there would only be 11 of us instead of 12 and we had only heard a little bit of the evidence we were all discharged and had to wait around to see if we were selected again.
I only went and got selected again and had to listen to the first lot of evidence all over again, and it was just as boring as the first time. The case didn’t get interesting, it was clear what we all though the verdict was so a few days later we retired for deliberation and I got to be the foreman and delivered some justice.
The second week just highlighted what a complete waste of time jury duty can be. Got selected for another jury panel and got in to court to hear the first days evidence and it was clear that despite hoping for a case at least a bit more interesting than the last one, or even, fingers crossed, a nice murder trial, the trial we were on was a load of rubbish and shouldnt even have gone to court. Lo and behold, the day later and the case is thrown out as it was a complete pile of shite. Thanks for wasting two of my days, let’s bring on the next few days and hopefully I’ll get on a good case this time.
That didn’t happen. Got selected for a jury each of the next few days only for the bastards to go and plead guilty before I even had the chance to go in to court.
Now I would like to think that news of me being the foreman on my first trial and dispensing justice the way I saw fit had spread and the defendants thought there was no point even going to court if I was going to be deciding the verdict but still, what a waste of time.
So there you go, jury duty may seem like a pretty damn good thing to get selected for but it’s pretty much nothing but sitting around in the waiting area, reading books and trying to pass the time. The likelihood of getting selected for a trail you would class as ‘good’ are pretty minimal so if you enjoy dispensing justice to petty crimes then jury duty may be your thing, otherwise it’s really nothing other than a good excuse to get a few weeks out of work.
On the plus side though I did manage to read 4 out of the 5 books in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy so at least one good thing did come out of jury duty.
