I may not be traveling much this month, but I felt like I stepped into a whole other world when I had jury duty on Tuesday.
In case you haven't been through the experience, time slows down dramatically when you have jury duty. It's like some sort of bizarre time warp - people outside are progressing through life as normal, but everything inside the courthouse is in slow motion. For example, the woman who gave the orientation talked for a solid 45 minutes. This might have been slightly more tolerable if the content of said orientation hadn't quickly veered toward topics so scintillating as the fact that the coin return on one of the vending machines was broken.
After a couple hours of catching up on my e-mail backlog (possibly the most productive two hours I've had all summer), I was called into a trial along with 19 other prospective jurors. Once in the room, 12 were selected to enter the jury box, and the rest of us stood by to witness the questioning begin.
It wasn't long before one juror "admitted" that she didn't think she could be objective in the case, which involved a fur protester accused of interfering with police business, resisting arrest and attempting escape. The juror was dismissed, and I was called as the next juror #3.
Then they commenced with three hours (I kid you not) of questioning the jury about our backgrounds, beliefs and biases. The seemingly novice defense lawyer honored the time warp by asking a zillion and one inane questions that revealed nothing of any use whatsoever.
Things got a little more interesting when the prosecuting attorney stepped up. He was one of those slick, "I want to be a politician someday" types. While his pace and style were certainly more entertaining, his condescending attitude were too much temptation - I simply had to mess with him.
My first opportunity came when he acted out an example: "Imagine that this cabinet is a fridge," he said, as if we were four years old. "Now imagine that I walk up to the fridge, take out a soda, and drink it. What do think my intentions were at that moment?"
"To drink the soda?" says one of the less argumentative jurors.
"Right. My intention was to drink the soda," says lawyer-boy. "As you can see, intentions are conveyed by actions. Can we all agree that actions convey intent?"
Picture nodding heads all around the jury box, except me, shaking my head no.
Lawyer boy: "Ms. Grimes, do you have a problem?"
Me: "I don't agree. Intentions are complex, and you can't assume you know someone's intentions based solely on your interpretation of their actions."
Strike one.
After asking enough questions to identify the liberals and troublemakers in the group who dare believe in free speech (including "are any of you anarchists?" - again, I kid you not), he honed in on a few of us with some more pointed questions.
Lawyer boy: "Ms. Grimes. Do you agree that the Portland police do a good job of facilitating protests? That they do a good job of allowing people to demonstrate?"
Me: "Well, those are two different questions. Are you asking if they do a good job of facilitating protests, or merely allowing them? Because facilitating and allowing aren't the same thing."
At this point he actually choked a bit and couldn't formulate a response for a good five seconds.
Strike two.
Finally, he asked the jury if anyone was aware of the organization "Black Box." I raised my hand, to which he asked how I'm familiar with them. I said that I donated some money to them following the last election to help investigate possible election fraud (assuming it's the same Blackbox I'm familiar with).
Lawyer boy: "If Blackbox was involved in this case, do you think you could set aside your relationship with them to be objective?"
Me: "I don't really know. I have no idea what their involvement is, so I can't really speculate how I would feel about information I don't have."
Him: "So... could you be objective?"
Me: "I don't know - probably."
Strike three.
At this point I think he was hoping the judge would throw me out so he wouldn't have to use one of his reject cards on me. When that didn't happen, he ended the questioning and the judge sent us out of the room for "five minutes" while they picked which six of us would make up the actual jury.
Thirty minutes later, we were called back in and - try not to be shocked - I was not selected to be on the jury. Truth be told, I was a little bummed. A free speech/civil disobedience case is about as interesting as it gets. And when I got home and had a chance to do a little reading, I found a handful of articles online about the case. Apparently the real controversy wasn't the charges against the defendant so much as the excessive force the police are said to have used when making the arrests.
I'll be very interested to see how this case turns out.
