Note: this was sent to us yesterday at 4:30 PM.
OK, so looks like I’m out. No glamorous, high-profile, tell-all-book-deal, pill-problem, celebrity coke-murder jury for me this time. Just some Hasidic property dispute that I probably won’t even get called for. Also they confiscated my camera on the way back from lunch, so I had to fly cell-phone for the rest of the afternoon. This is the main waiting room for jurors where you’re not allowed to have food, aka where the party is not.
And here’s the court’s generic coke machine. You wouldn’t believe how many grown men I saw buy cans of Yoohoo from this thing.*
And here’s a guy in the bathroom who was leaving a voicemail while taking a dump. It wasn’t a ginger one either, every third word he said ended with "hnnngh." So foul.The whole juror pool is like the most immaculate crossection of the city possible, to the point where there aren’t any duplicates. I realize this is the entire point, but still, weird to be in the middle of. Have you ever been in a room with 500 people where nobody had anything in common with anybody? I mean, even in concentration camps prisoners knew some of each other. The sitting room isn’t so bad, but the food room is way too quiet for how cramped it is and everybody keeps jerking their heads around to avoid eye contact. You could probably power a car by how carefully people edge around each other’s seats.About half an hour after lunch, I finally got called into an "Empaneling room" with 14 other jurors. Two lawyers came in, one really gangly one with the start of a bad combover, and the other a guy who was like a plumper Kevin Spacey with an undersized mouth. Whenever he talked it looked like that joke they used to do on Conan where they’d superimpose the lips over a still picture. They explained the case and asked us to rate how unbiased we thought we could be on a scale of 1 to 10. There were two other white kids in the room and they both said something like "Um, I’m a one because I hate lawyers and think nobody should sue." It was so obviously bullshit, but the lawyers and everyone else had to act like they had some sort of incurable mental defect that prejudiced them against the law. I wanted to distance myself from these assholes so I gave myself an honest 8, but in the end it didn’t matter cause everybody who wasn’t a 10 got dismissed.I know this is the basic foundation of the justice system, but honestly I don’t get the whole random sampling, no bias thing. If you keep the jury balanced, what’s wrong with a little bias. I mean, the case we were hearing about was a lawsuit between two Hasids and there wasn’t even a regular Jew in the room. How do a bunch of total strangers from different parts of the city equal a jury of their "peers"? It’d be one thing if it was like a Jew getting sued by some Greek dude from Queens, but say for instance two teenagers from the same high school get into a fight and somehow it lands in court. Is it really that "just" to avoid picking kids their age who’d have some idea about the circumstances in favor of the usual jury makeup—a bunch of old black ladies and one or two businessmen who feel a sense of civic obligation?The other thing that bugged me was the whole time they were questioning us, the lawyers kept using this sort of weirdly heavy-handed emotional language, like "Now, do you promise me you can look at all the evidence before reaching a conclusion? I want you to make a promise to me and the court that you’ll be as fair and honest as you can be." It was like being in youth group at church. Then again, I think it might be specifically tailored to help weed through the old ladies (they are the court’s bread and butter), since they ate it up (the first 10’s response was actually "I am completely unbiased because I always tell the truth").Anyways, time to head back to my shlubby workaday office existence. Here’s the back half of the name parade:Duk Wun ShooViolent Jim (I swear this is what he said)Santo BalbodinoArcades BewisAaron CeolaVito GerziakSarah GindyYamil LegDominico SavagliaIndy HerschMurphy MoissLatoya RossYenetta YaverskayaLESS DREMENS*Five.
OK, so looks like I’m out. No glamorous, high-profile, tell-all-book-deal, pill-problem, celebrity coke-murder jury for me this time. Just some Hasidic property dispute that I probably won’t even get called for. Also they confiscated my camera on the way back from lunch, so I had to fly cell-phone for the rest of the afternoon. This is the main waiting room for jurors where you’re not allowed to have food, aka where the party is not.
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And here’s the court’s generic coke machine. You wouldn’t believe how many grown men I saw buy cans of Yoohoo from this thing.*
And here’s a guy in the bathroom who was leaving a voicemail while taking a dump. It wasn’t a ginger one either, every third word he said ended with "hnnngh." So foul.The whole juror pool is like the most immaculate crossection of the city possible, to the point where there aren’t any duplicates. I realize this is the entire point, but still, weird to be in the middle of. Have you ever been in a room with 500 people where nobody had anything in common with anybody? I mean, even in concentration camps prisoners knew some of each other. The sitting room isn’t so bad, but the food room is way too quiet for how cramped it is and everybody keeps jerking their heads around to avoid eye contact. You could probably power a car by how carefully people edge around each other’s seats.About half an hour after lunch, I finally got called into an "Empaneling room" with 14 other jurors. Two lawyers came in, one really gangly one with the start of a bad combover, and the other a guy who was like a plumper Kevin Spacey with an undersized mouth. Whenever he talked it looked like that joke they used to do on Conan where they’d superimpose the lips over a still picture. They explained the case and asked us to rate how unbiased we thought we could be on a scale of 1 to 10. There were two other white kids in the room and they both said something like "Um, I’m a one because I hate lawyers and think nobody should sue." It was so obviously bullshit, but the lawyers and everyone else had to act like they had some sort of incurable mental defect that prejudiced them against the law. I wanted to distance myself from these assholes so I gave myself an honest 8, but in the end it didn’t matter cause everybody who wasn’t a 10 got dismissed.
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