Jury Duty, Part VI: The Summary Execution

During the jury selection process of any trial, the potential panelists are subjected to as many rounds as are necessary of voir dire, a term taken from the French for direct questioning, translating roughly to "scary vulture." Now, at this point I'm sure you're asking yourself: "is he really going to be taking this sanctimonious fucking pedant's tone through the whole thing because he served on one jury one time?" Probably, reader. Probably.

That was just the beginning, however, of my education in American law. I'd go so far as to deem myself a full-fledged expert now on all aspects of our legal system, having been on the inside, having seen how the sausage is made. Oh, there's sausage-makin' going on, everyone, make no mistake. And that sausage is made of the same thing regular sausage is made out of: gristle, hooves, cartilage, glands, tripe, chitterlings and nose meat. Except, you know, in law form. Let that sink in.

There are two main things I took away from this crash course in legaling:

I. The Law Is Pretend

Let's set aside the idea that a case should be decided by me and 11 retirees in a system of selection that automatically excludes people who know anything about how the law works. Need someone to determine all of another human's livelihood and the value of their suffering based on 150 years of case law and the specific state and/or federal statutes that narrowly apply? Great, let's assemble a team of accountants, pipe-fitters, aestheticians, college dance majors and one middle manager. I can sort of get why you'd do it in criminal cases where you'd want input from outside the same system making the arrests and laying the charges to weigh the stripping of a person's physical freedoms. In civil cases, the state is only involved because somebody figured out they could make the other side show up if they could just catch 'em with a process server. The judge specifically and the law enforcement establishment in general has no stake in the process or the outcome. They're just making me do it because they want me to remember that they can. It's the exact same rationale that leads to older kids making smaller kids sometimes eat a bug or touch dog poop. It's a power move, with just a touch of institutional sadism.

Also, in every case, the very strict rules for legal proceedings mean both sides have every scrap of evidence shared. They have lists of the witness and evidence to be presented, in order. Further, both sides have already questioned the witnesses under oath in pretrial depositions that go into WAY more detail than in-trial testimony ever would be able to. And further, in cases like mine, there have been dozens of similar cases involving the same counsel, the same judges, the same evidence, the same expert witnesses. So what we're witnessing is not an unfolding narrative of progress and surprise. It's a strictly choreographed shadow puppet play, one the players have performed as part of a traveling road show for weeks, months, maybe (as in our case) years. The entire thing runs as produced, not even really off-book. The only variable is we, the people too dumb to get out of jury duty.

II. Judges Are Liars

I admit this is a slightly harsh assessment, but hear me out: so before we go to deliberate, the judge reads out seventy goddamned pages of jury instructions for us. First of all, we get a copy of these instructions, so when the judge announced "seventy pages!" with a resigned sigh, I know that was bullshit because some of these pages had, like, two lines on them. And it was all double-spaced and wide-margined. Get a responsible editor on it and it would have been like 15 pages, max. Strike one, judge.

Second, he says explicitly when he's talking about this stuff we have to do that we're going to be considering the merits of each charge (there were 38 questions we had to answer) and civil penalties, if any, according to specific formulae relative to the values of the goods and services in dispute in the case. There could also be punitive damages, but those would be determined (and I want to to be very clear about this) by the judge at a later time.

So we does what we does, twelve people, little tiny room, we shanghai some unsuspecting bloke to be the foreman, then we run the worksheet, bingo-bango, back to the court and we're on our way home, after five-ish long-ass weeks.

[SMASH ZOOM RECORD SCRATCH]

Hold the underwear! Now because we answered in the affirmative on some of the 38 questions, now WE THE ENJURORED will have to go back to the jury room to figure out punitive damages. We, NOT the judge like the JUDGE had said a day or two before. This was where you lost me, judge. I know it's 2018, but words still mean things. You broke my heart.

So now we have the same 12 people who thought they were all about to go back to their mildly disappointing lives locked back in the same room, this time with NO GUIDELINES OR LIMITS like we had with the civil penalties, to figure out punitive damages in the case we'd already decided. You have not seen tension until you've watched a group of strangers forced together to try to do math. It was a Sartre play without the payout in meandering existential ennui at the end.

Luckily we had a lot of previous case-law for similar cases involving similar types of violations with similar sized parties and contested on similar scales to draw from. AHAHAHA, NO, WRONG, we had nothing but the donuts someone from the group bought with American money and borderline Canadian kindness. That was it. Sugar dough deep fried in fat and the palpable discomfort of people trying to make a group decision that had no bearing on any of them personally.

In the end, I can assure we fulfilled our duties in the most responsible and reasonable way possible. And not because it was Wednesday and the judge was going out of town for a month, so we'd have to come back if we didn't get done. We did the right thing.

So now that it's over, with a whole day to reflect and put it into perspective, I can say there were some lessons I learned, some life imponderables I was forced to ponder, some walnuts of truth I was obliged to crack with the nutcracker of involuntary experience, chief among them was this: I don't have to do jury duty again for three years. Because of some law, those fuckers can't touch me for 36 months. The irony is of the mildest variety, but oh god, I'll take it.