No Exit, Also Known as Jury Duty

It is a white, windowless room, (you know maybe there were windows but I don't remember any natural light) with unframed posters, and prohibitive notices. With all the people slumping in chairs, it is hot and a bit ripe. If you don't show up, you will be found, and punished. When you do show up, you cannot leave without permission. It is not clear when permission might be given.

Welcome to jury duty.  

Then they show a video. About the glories of service in this government of the people, by the people and for the people. I have been a believer. But something about the reality does not accord with the beautiful principles flashed before us psychically and virtually physically imprisoned Winston Smiths.

We have been exhorted to arrive at 8:30 a.m.  We are greeted by whited out closed windows, nary a bureaucrat to be found.  Somewhat after nine a rumpled man appears. He is a judge of the court and he is "welcoming" us and thanking us for our "commitment". And then he is gone, replaced by lovely twenty somethings trying to make the best of their role as our keepers for the day, or the week, or the month, whatever is to be our lot.

And then we wait. And wait. The magazines are relatively new, from 2008. Well used by the looks of the ripped covers. Those who know me can imagine my physical tics as I am constrained to wait, not minutes, as we do at the movies, but hours. We are allowed to stray to the hallway, old washed out marble, several courtrooms locked and unused, the only remnant old masking tape left behind when the signs were taken away; old phone booths bereft of their seats and small counters; locked windows (there was one accidentally open or broken through which the air from the parking lots sifted in, with etched in graffiti.

I have been on two juries in the past. After thirty years being a lawyer myself and seeing truth battered mercilessly and cynically, I have come to the conclusion that the system is broken. I know it took me longer than most. I am annoyed at my colleagues who are on other floors engaged in endless settlement maneuvers that are holding us caged creatures in stasis. There needs to be a limit on the cyclical discussions. When a judge says "trial is at 9:30 tomorrow" that needs to be it, no more hemming and hawing, and "But, your Honor.  The game of looking for the sympathetic juror has to stop. If its about truth, let us see it all, nt only what the chess game provides. But it isn't about truth, yeah, that's right, that's what I said.

We have impressed so much crap around our Founding Fathers' principles that the principles are lost to us. There is an old poster of Judge Ito (remember him, OJ circa 1990 somthing?) telling me how wonderful it is for me to be here, cause once he was. I don't think Thomas Jefferson would agree, but then he has no credibility in this society being a dead European with flaws which of course no one in this modern day with all our special knowledge has.

Can I be fair? Yes. I have, and I would be again. I would listen to the rules that they foist upon me that make no sense at all, that were the stuff of my classroom at law school and 25 years of seeing how the prosecutor is held to a completely different standard than the defense such that the playing field is not only not level, but of Sisyphean proportions for the ones with the burden of proof.

I will always do my duty. It was how I was trained, from my mother, to my parochial education, to my Church whose leadership fails to follow what it preaches in the most grandiose of manners, to my old career, where politics began to govern more than the ethics purportedly purveyed, to follow the rules set before me.

But each tour of duty leading to those dank rooms has become more and more like torture. I had planned on telling the questioning counsel and the judge as much as they would allow of these things, on voir dire, and as to that they would likely not have allowed me a soapbox.

But wonder of wonders, at about three o'clock in the afternoon (I shall refrain from speculation about the fact that this is Holy Week, and Passover), after an earlier group of my brethren were sent to a courtroom, we were freed, at least for a year from our commitment. No doubt lawyers and judges and even defendants were on vacation so they really didn't need us. I am grateful . I really could use the rest of the week for prayer and meditation. For me, this time, there was an exit.