Jury Duty

Jury Duty tried Teancom's patience.  He wasn't happy that we'd abandoned him to Grandma for a week.  He had fun while he was there, but he was also sick one day (I think he threw up about a dozen times.  I was sad, cause only a mother should have to deal with that kind of stuff.  But I was also really happy:  I didn't have to deal with it!  Waa haa haa.) and he told me he'd been sad without  me.  He wouldn't talk to me on the phone while he was gone.  I asked him why, once he was home, and he said, "I was sad!"  I asked him about the morning when he cried for about half an hour and he said, "That was the same thing!"  It's sad to be away from mommy when you're a mommy's boy.  ...  Actually, I still miss my mommy, and I'm 29 years old.  So I guess it's just always sad to be away from your mommy.

Then he spent another whole week with babysitters.  Near the end of jury duty, one of my friends on the grand jury asked me how my son was doing with me being gone.  I said, "He's mad at me."   So on Friday afternoon, Tank was super happy when I picked him up from my friend's house.  The last babysitter I'll need for about a month.  We were driving home and Tank said, "Today was your last day of Judy Dudy?"  I smiled.  "Yep."  Tank thought about that for a minute and then said, "What did you learn?"

I learned lots of things, but not much that would appeal to a 4-year-old.  So I told him truthfully that I learned, or rather re-learned, that I have a good life and a good family and I'm so blessed.

In some of the cases, we sat there as a Grand Jury, wondering what in the world would have possessed someone to do what they did.  After trying and trying to come up with something that made sense, it finally struck me that we wouldn't ever get it.  Some people are born to lives and situations that are so unlike what we know, that it might as well be another world they live in.  A world where a body count is a status symbol.  It was strange to contemplate.  I have ideas about what is "human" and what "makes sense," and I think those ideas are universal, but for some of the cases we heard, I had to throw those ideas out the window.  Turns out they aren't universal.  There are worlds where my "human" ideas don't mean anything.

I learned that the law isn't black and white, and that's a really good thing.  For instance, a theft is a felony if what you stole was worth $500 or more.  But it's not an automatic felony, because we can take into account prior record (or lack thereof) and try to show mercy by lessening the charge to a misdemeanor.  We did that often.  It was obvious, sometimes, that a crime had been committed, but it wasn't necessarily obvious that it should be pursued as a felony.

Quotes on the Courthouse Walls, a long side note

I learned that no one cares about the quotes written larger-than-life across the courthouse walls.  The quote across the main entrance is "The pure and wise and equal administration of the law is the first end and [greatest] blessing of social union."  I looked it up.  It was written by William Paley, a British Enlightment thinker who inspired the Founding Fathers.  So I started asking the cops and lawyers who work there about what it meant and why it's etched across our courthouse.  They didn't know.  They just stared at me like I was an alien.  Is it so weird to be curious?

I got comments like, "I've never thought about it," and, "You're smarter than I am."  That last one annoyed me.  The guy I asked has graduated law school, clearly he's intelligent.  I said to him, "Look.  I'm being asked to participate in the Justice System for 2 weeks.  I'm being asked to "do justly and love mercy."  Shouldn't I try to understand what's written on the courthouse walls?"  He said, "I wish more people thought like you."  Whatever.  But the Prosecuting Attorney that we worked with, Bill, said, "That's an interesting question," and, "I've never had anyone look up who said the quotes on the building."  I said, "The quotes on the wall are from Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, GOD, and William Paley.  Why is Paley's quote on our courthouse?"

Clearly I pushed the issue.  The cop I asked, Steve, he said he'd look it up for me.  He came back and said, from the research he did (he did research for me!), he thinks William Howard Taft chose the quote.  I knew Taft was one of our U.S. Presidents, but I wasn't aware that Taft was from the Cincinnati area, or that he was a lawyer.  You learn new things when you ask incessant questions.  Then, our last day of Jury Duty, the cop showed up with 30 pages of Cincinnati Courthouse history from a Sheriff Newsletter, including pictures of every courthouse Cincinnati has ever had!  Talk about going above and beyond!  Steve the Cop is my new best friend.

Bottom line:  When you work at a building with a quote written across it in type that's literally as tall as you are, you should know something about the quote.
Second bottom line:  I don't like it when people look at me like I'm crazy for being curious.

End of long side note

Lastly, I learned that the "random" process of choosing jurors isn't very random.  When we first showed up, I asked Bill, our P.A., how jurors are chosen. He said that it's from Registered Voters (he thinks), and that while it's supposed to be random, experience tells him that the same people get chosen over and over.  Great.  I'm pegged for life.  But that's not so bad, really, cause I learned a lot and it was great fun.  Seriously, I felt like the 11 of us were having an office party.  People brought food and had lunch together and laughed and talked about their grandkids and figured out that they had mutual friends.  One of the gals on the Grand Jury loves books, it turns out, so we went to a great little downtown bookstore over our 2-hour lunch break, when neither of us were hungry.  The bookstore had all kinds of old and rare books, so I mentioned to her in passing that I wanted to find Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop.  We ended up splitting up and I went back to our "office" first.  When she came back, she presented me with a hard-bound copy of The Old Curiosity Shop!  Jury Duty was that kind of experience.

And Rob will find out for himself because he got his notice last week!  That's not a joke.  He was slated for early December, but he had to reschedule because we're going out of town for Christmas.  And since he was rescheduling anyway, I told him he should request being on a Grand Jury instead of Petit, like he was assigned, because he'd have more fun.  ...  "Random" process, my foot!