by Gib Whitney

Created on: September 22, 2009   Last Updated: September 25, 2009

Jury Service: A Civic Inconvience

The summons to appear found its way to my mailbox and was hastily perused, then promptly tucked away to be reconsidered another time. I greatly dreaded the thought of going and to me the summons represented little more than - pardon the cliche - a giant thorn in my side. In the past, one could easily be excused for the most basic of reasons: I have itchy feet syndrome, which would have been a valid and that would be it.

These days, however, it's next to impossible to get out of service: I have a split personality named Ralph who surfaces at random and recites Haiku poems in Russian, which now seems to only get: "sorry, see you on your appointed date."

Later on as I stared down the summons, it seemed that my choices were few: Option 1: be a model citizen and go; Option 2: postpone it as long as possible; Option 3: throw the summons away and feign non-receipt. Unfortunately the karma-conscious being in me was repulsed by the throw-it-away option and postponement would just prolong the agony, so I was left with no choice but to be a model citizen and go.

I was fortunate in that my work paid for five-days which helped take some of the pain out of going. I actually even started to believe that it might be an interesting experience after all.

So I packed myself up and drove downtown on the requested date and after a couple of re-reads of my summons, found the jury parking area located at The Disney Music Hall. This architectural masterpiece had me in awe, but was unfortunately situated at what seemed like a several mile hike away from the court.

Thankfully, I had good walking shoes on and made it to the jury assembly room where myself and the other prospective jurors sat with varying degrees of pained looks, while we received our introduction to the process of being a model juror, as well heard the requisite it's your duty speech from a judge who just happened to be passing by.

At that point we were all left to wander through whatever stage of ennui we saw fit, while we waited together in utter silence - a certain overall sign of the collective misery that held us all in its grip. (Note: bringing Saul Bellow's "Henderson The Rain King" along was instrumental in preventing me from jumping out of the closest window I could find).

Before long, I was part a selected group that was ushered to a court room to potentially be put on an attempted murder case. The judge informed us that the trial would take anywhere from 10-15 days and if we

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