{"id":135,"date":"2008-10-25T22:30:23","date_gmt":"2008-10-26T02:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/?p=135"},"modified":"2009-08-18T16:56:31","modified_gmt":"2009-08-18T21:56:31","slug":"jury-duty-almost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/?p=135","title":{"rendered":"Jury Duty?  Almost!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Blind Justice, and we love it that way!\" src=\"http:\/\/ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp-img\/justice.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"356\" align=\"right\" \/>On Oct. 14, 2008, the <a title=\"oed - wotd\" href=\"http:\/\/oed.com\/cgi\/display\/wotd\">Word of the Day<\/a> from the <a href=\"http:\/\/oed.com\/\">Oxford English Dictionary<\/a> was <em>jury<\/em>.\u00a0 The OED is a little more thorough than many dictionaries in that their lexicographers not only define words, but also chart the use of those\u00a0 words over time, providing copious verbatim quotations to that effect.\u00a0 In this case, the story of the word <em>jury<\/em> begins in 1187 with a reference in Latin.\u00a0 One might have thought the word would be somewhat older, but we apparently did not derive the entirety of our civic system from the ancients.<\/p>\n<p>The OED defines the word thus:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A company of persons (orig. men) sworn to render a verdict or true answer upon some question or questions officially submitted to them; in modern times, in a court of justice, usually upon evidence delivered to them touching the issue; but in the earliest times usually upon facts or matters within their own knowledge, for which reason they were summoned from the neighborhood to which the question submitted to them related&#8230;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The reason I mention it is that I recently was called for jury duty in the middle disrict of North Carolina.\u00a0 The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncmd.uscourts.gov\/ncmdmap.gif\">middle district<\/a> comprises 24 counties:\u00a0 Alamance, Cabarrus, Caswell, Chatham, Davidson, Davie, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Hoke, Lee, Montgomery, Moore, Orange, Person, Randolph, Richmond, Rockingham, Rowan, Scotland, Stanly, Stokes, Surry, Yadkin.  The court holds proceedings in three cities, Durham, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem.\u00a0 I live in Durham; Greensboro is an hour away; through some bureaucratic fiat, the wisdom of which surpasses all understanding, I was called to jury duty in Winston-Salem, 90 miles to the west.<\/p>\n<p>Winston-Salem is hardly my neighborhood.\u00a0 Neither are most of those other 24 counties.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an interesting concept, though, a jury.\u00a0 As implied in the above definition, the jury has its basis in the idea that a group of people can determine a verdict or statement of truth by listening to opposing renditions of conditions and events occurring at some remove in the past.\u00a0 They do so surmising that neither of the renditions actually reflects the truth; they come to their conclusion on the matter in question by interpolation&#8211;and often intuition.\u00a0 It is a system fraught with sources of potential error, yet we have clung to it over the centuries as our best solution to the problem of doing justice to the citizens of our country.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Doing justice to them.&#8221;\u00a0 What a turn of phrase that is.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve never been called to jury duty, you&#8217;ve missed participating in&#8211;or at least witnessing&#8211;an exercise in human nature, the good and the not so.\u00a0 The <a href=\"http:\/\/ap.google.com\/article\/ALeqM5je6Pw1sViz24JRo9F0PNhoqMtzTwD940BJE01\">news from Washington, D.C.<\/a>, about the problems jurors in the Ted Stevens trial have been having&#8211;and causing&#8211;demonstrates the kind of thing I&#8217;m talking about.\u00a0 But how did these people come to find themselves confronting these issues&#8211;and each other&#8211;in the first place?<\/p>\n<p>No less an authority than the august <a href=\"http:\/\/uscourts.gov\/\">USCourts.Gov<\/a> states that potential jurors &#8220;are summoned for service&#8230;from voters lists (and sometimes drivers lists).&#8221;\u00a0 I actually have heard people cite this fact as their rationale for never registering to vote.\u00a0 For this and other reasons, our elected officials have only had to win over a majority of the 30% of the American population that actually votes.\u00a0 The job of the trial lawyer obviously is even more focussed.<\/p>\n<p>I have voted since I turned 18&#8211;some mumble-mumble years ago; thus, I have been called for duty on various kinds of juries every couple of years throughout that time.\u00a0 I&#8217;m going to keep voting, but the thought has crossed my mind, &#8220;What would happen if I just didn&#8217;t show up?&#8221;\u00a0 Once again, USCourts.Gov holds forth:\u00a0 &#8220;Any person who fails to return a completed qualification questionnaire may be summoned to appear before the clerk of the court to fill out the form.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Gosh, I thought the penalty would be lots worse.\u00a0 Staying after class with the school marm, no matter how sternly she regarded me, doesn&#8217;t sound so awful bad.<\/p>\n<p>So in this way, through light, easily resisted coercion and the blandishments of a daily stipend, juries are supposed to be representative of the population at large.\u00a0 As we have seen, though, being drawn from voters lists, juries already are fairly restrictively sourced.\u00a0 The on-paper qualifications, however, seem refreshingly open:<\/p>\n<p>USCourts.Gov explains, &#8220;To be legally qualified for jury service, an individual must:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>be a United States citizen<\/li>\n<li>be at least 18 years of age<\/li>\n<li>reside primarily in the judicial district for one year<\/li>\n<li>be adequately proficient in English<\/li>\n<li>have no disqualifying mental or physical condition<\/li>\n<li>not currently be subject to felony charges<\/li>\n<li>never have been convicted of a felony (unless civil rights have been legally restored)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have found that an unspoken requirement for service, in addition to an ignorance of the law as stated above, is a complete lack of knowledge on the particulars of the matter under consideration by the court.\u00a0 More than once I have avoided actually being seated on a jury by professing knowledge and expertise on some point of contention in the trial.\u00a0 Once, when the trial had to do with an accident in which one of the vehicles was equipped with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Air_brake_(road_vehicle)\">air brakes<\/a>, I asserted that my experience driving school buses had conferred expertise in this area.\u00a0 My hoped-for rejection in this case took the form of a brief statement to this effect:\u00a0 &#8220;Mr. Byers, you are dismissed.&#8221;\u00a0 Sweeter words were never spoken, yet I felt obligated to convey just that soupcon of disappointment that let everyone know that I had been ready to serve and was just that little bit miffed that I had missed my chance to do so.<\/p>\n<p>Back to my own recent experience with jury duty, it was rather anti-climatic.\u00a0 I had been somewhat impressed that this was Federal court&#8211;more serious than my previous experience, or so I thought.\u00a0 As things turned out I never sat for a day in the jury pool in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncmd.uscourts.gov\/\">North Carolina Middle District Court<\/a>, Winston-Salem Divisional Office, Winston-Salem, NC.<\/p>\n<p>My term of service was six weeks, and I dutifully called in to the special phone line every Sunday evening, though I dreaded the possibility of being told I had to start a two-hour journey into uncertainty the following morning at 6:00.\u00a0 Each week I received the message that my services would not be required at the moment, but with the clear implication that I should not relax my vigilance; I would be required to come sooner or later.\u00a0 Since this was the period of post-Ike gasoline shortage in North Carolina, the prospect of being stranded, either in Durham or in Winston-Salem, was quite real to me, the father of a pre-schooler.\u00a0 Having started a new, very demanding job, too, I dreaded having to be away on such a flimsy-seeming pretext.\u00a0 On this one occasion, my life reversed its recent trend, and I was spared the complications of jury duty in what could be taken for an almost foreign land.<\/p>\n<p>What do I know about Winston-Salem?\u00a0 What do I know about the law?\u00a0 What do I know about the kinds of matters they address in Federal district courts?\u00a0 By God, I know nothing; I am, thus, just the sort of person they want there; and to think, they somehow missed the chance to have me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Oct. 14, 2008, the Word of the Day from the Oxford English Dictionary was jury.\u00a0 The OED is a little more thorough than many dictionaries in that their lexicographers not only define words, but also chart the use of those\u00a0 words over time, providing copious verbatim quotations to that effect.\u00a0 In this case, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[23,25],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-commentary","tag-life-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":393,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}