The Pitters' Place

Because I performed jury duty this week, and day one was the day they picked the jury for this:

https://wtop.com/national/2019/03/trial ... ian-woman/

It only dawned on me that I could get sucked into that case when I was getting dressed in the morning and Minnesota Public Radio had a story that jury selection was beginning that day. I froze, completely horrified.

There were 200 of us in the room and they pulled 75 people for the initial jury pool, to be whittled down to a final count via their responses to questions from lawyers. At one point they called my name, and I felt sick to my stomach at the idea of spending weeks and weeks in a trial that the whole world would be watching, being hounded by the press, and basically being in a no win situation all around. But then it turned out that by coincidence, there were two of us with the same name, just different spellings, and the other guy was who they wanted. Phew!

The trial I did sit in judgment on was a mess, though. Two counts of assault, one of them domestic, and both victims had changed their minds and didn't want the guy to get in trouble. The actually had to be arrested and spent the night in jail before they were forced to testify, at which point they started very obviously lying about not remembering anything about the night in question.

Thought it was going to be a hung jury there for a bit, as 11 of us were for Guilty, and one guy insisted that it should be Not Guilty since the women were so untrustworthy. But after we all watched the cop's body cam footage a third time and listened to the panicked 911 call a second time, he changed his mind. Guilty on both counts, it was. Then afterwards we found out that the guy was a convicted felon on many other charges, which included previous assaults.

I actually caught the thread on IMDb where you mentioned this (I still lurk there occasionally). Glad to hear you dodged the bullet. I've never even been called for jury duty, but given my semi-interest in law (I watched People's Court during lunch for years) I don't think I'd mind the experience... as long as it didn't take forever.

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I've never even been called for jury duty, but given my semi-interest in law (I watched People's Court during lunch for years) I don't think I'd mind the experience... as long as it didn't take forever.

Then you probably would have loved getting a judge like the one we did, because after the trial was over and the defendant was taken away, he held a discussion with the entire jury and the lawyers from both sides where everyone got to ask questions about the law, processes, and particulars in the case we had just experienced. The lawyers even had questions for us. The judge said doing this was the favorite part of his job and it really showed. He obviously had a great deal of passion for public participation in seeing justice be done. It really made me feel a lot better about our democracy.

Yeah, that does sound quite interesting. Very cool that you got such an interested judge.