According to the Marion County Juror Pool website, I got to experience one of the “privileges of citizenship” yesterday. On the surface, I couldn’t agree more. Our forefathers shed blood and tears to set forth the seventh amendment.
But, privilege is not the overriding feeling I walked away with.
I’m not going to rail on the process of jury duty. I actually thought the city did a fine job. Instructions were clear, we were kept informed throughout the day, and the process was explicitly explained to us. I even had the luck of being called on “juror appreciation week.” As such, they had muffins, fruit, and juice boxes for us – a luxury not normally afforded to potential jurors
What troubles me, however, is some of the people I shared the room with. What I witnessed during my four and-a-half hours of waiting shocked me.
For starters, at least a quarter of the people showed up late – some, as many as 20 minutes late.
Then came the blooper reel. I could tell the woman who was in charge of keeping us updated had done her job for quite some time. She simplified every instruction to the most basic level humanly possible, addressed mistakes and misunderstanding others had made, and politely repeated the most important parts. It reminded me of the saying, “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them.” This woman had it down to a science.
Despite her skill, multiple people in the room failed to pay attention, comprehend, and/or heed her instructions. Throughout the day, she had to deal with an insane level of what appeared to be either extreme stupidity, or just a complete lack of care.
She called half of the names in the room and asked those people to hand their surveys to the bailiff, and asked the other half to hold on to their forms until the next bailiff came. Simple, first-grade level instructions, right? Wrong. Within seconds, somebody walked up to the podium to ask her what to do because his name hadn’t been called. This forced her to get back on the microphone to make sure people whose names hadn’t been called had not given the first bailiff their form.
After the second group was called, another guy had an issue. He apparently showed up, went to the wrong room, which was empty, and sat there for 20 minutes. The fact that nobody was checking him in, and there were no other potential jurors showing up, must not have been a strong enough clue to him that something was wrong. After his name wasn’t called, he approached the lady in charge to find out why. When the lady found out he had sat in the wrong room, come in late, had not checked in, didn’t tell anyone, and expected everything to proceed smoothly, she was dumbfounded. So was I.
Throughout the day, she had to call off names at three separate times. She asked that we loudly and clearly say “here” when our name was called. Again, that’s something we learned back in grade school, so surely nobody could mess up that instruction. Boy was I wrong again. Some people said here so quiet nobody could possibly hear them, and she was forced to asked people to speak loudly at least 10 times. Others, despite sitting right there, didn’t respond to their own name! It took two or three repetitions for some people to get out the word “here.”
That’s not all of what I witnessed during my fateful day of jury summons, but I think it’s enough to paint a clear picture of the humor that kept me from boredom yesterday. If only our forefathers could have been flies on the wall yesterday. I’m not sure if they would laugh, cry, or both, but I’m pretty sure that was not what they imagined when they wrote the seventh amendment.
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