Jury Duty and a Grandbaby

A few months ago I got a letter in the mail that said that I was called to federal jury duty.  Well after I got that letter I filled out everything online, then I got a hernia.  Then I got a summons about two weeks before my hernia surgery, and on the day I was supposed to get a colonoscopy.  So I freaked out and left them a message that I needed to have these medical procedures taken care of and when I called back they said that I didn't need to show up.  That was nice of them.

However, I got another summons on 10/31.  That's right Halloween and the last day of my jury duty, but this time I got picked for jury duty, federal jury duty.  Actually it was not that bad of an experience and it was pretty enlightening but the situation at work was pretty tense so I was hoping that I wouldn't have to serve.  But I did get picked.

First of all it was a civil case not a criminal case so there were only 8 jurors.  It was a skiing accident where someone uphill hit someone who had stopped downhill and broke his hip so that he had to have a hip replacement.  The first thing we wondered about was why it was a federal case at all.  I asked and it was because the plaintiff and the defendant were in different states that it was a federal case.  So when someone says don't make a federal case of it they're being realistic you really can make a federal case of something and this is what happened.

We decided that it was an accident and that no one had been negligent.  At the end of the trial the judge invited us up to her chambers and we all went up, the jurors that is.  This was probably the most enlightening part of the whole experience.

Actually it worked pretty much the way that I thought that it would with the information that I picked up from TV and John Grisham novels.  A jury pool is called, there was 28 of us, and they put everyone in random order.  I was 12th which is not a very good position to be in.  The lawyers ask us questions which is a process called "voir dire" which is a French term meaning "to tell the truth" at least that's what they told us.  After they ask us questions the judge and lawyers go in and decide which jurors they will use.  They lawyers get to challenge a certain number of jurors for whatever reason they want, and the judge said that the lawyers always challenge lawyers in the jury pool because no one wants a lawyer on the jury.  After that they dismiss jurors for cause.  After that they take jurors numerically.  However, when they called us they again called us randomly so I didn't know it until the judge told us.

We don't really know how they picked us.  There was one juror who said that he owned his own business and that if he wasn't there he didn't earn an income.  However, during the trial we learned that he had family that was visiting from Germany.  When the judge learned about that she said that she would have dismissed him for that but that she couldn't dismiss him for financial reasons.  I admitted that I'd tried snowboarding once and hurt myself in the first 1/2 hour.  I was trying to be honest, but I was kind of hoping that they would thing that I would be biased against snowboarding, but apparently that didn't work.  Turns out that 5 of the jurors said something, 3 didn't, and we were a cross section of society; young, old, middle age, and seemed like a cross section of economic means as well.

I did find one thing interesting about being a juror.  In the movies everyone stands for the judge.  We stood for the judge at the beginning, but after we were called as jurors everyone stood for us when we entered or exited the court room.  I thought it was pretty cool.  On a personal level I didn't have to commute to Los Alamos so that's always a plus, and I got to go see Halloween and Trisha's house.  Trish said that they didn't even put that much stuff out for this Halloween.

Thennnnnn.  Kiki brought little Jonathan Ryan Nield into the world Wednesday.  Yeah.