I headed downtown for jury duty this morning with my bike in the car. I wanted to save the parking fees so I left the car at the Village Gate and rode to the Hall of Justice. I couldn’t find a bike rack in vast Public Safety courtyard so I locked it to a picnic table. I joined about two hundred people in a big room and we watched a twenty minute video, narrated by Sixty Minute man, Ed Bradley, on the New York State jury system. He covered a lot of ground from Medieval “Trial by Ordeal” to Perry Mason. About seventy of us were assigned to a judge’s courtroom on another floor so we marched up there and they began the jury selection process.
They called fourteen people at a time and sat them in the jury booth. The public defender described this phase as being like “speed dating”. The people’s attorney asked potential jurors questions like, “Do you think CSI and Law & Order are real or scripted?” “Do you realize that I am not an actor and that there are no extras in this courtroom?” “Do you realize that this is real and not scripted?” One guy said his father was a cop and he would be biased. He was excused. A woman said her hobby was gambling and she was not chosen. My hobby is painting crime faces from the newspaper but I haven’t been interviewed yet. Four jurors were selected by the time we broke for lunch. I rode my bike over to Rochester Art Supply to buy some white paint.
It is becoming clear that I am not jury material. I don’t know why exactly. It is just a hunch. I am a victim of a crime (several), have been accused of a crime, have a few lawyers in my family and I worked for the police department. I don’t know what way any of these factors slant but they seem to be looking for blank slates. By the end of the day they were still one short for a jury so they recessed until tomorrow.
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Met you at the ME show last week with Bill S. Although I’m a lawyer who has represented criminal defendants, I was picked as an alternate juror for a shocking case involving videotaped assaults against women. As an alternate juror, I heard the testimony, saw the physical evidence, listened to the opening and closing arguments and heard the judge’s charge to the jury. Then I was marched off to an empty room while the jury deliberated. When the jury wanted testimony read back, they brought me back to the courtroom, too. I was isolated throughout the deliberation process and had no chance to hear my fellow jurors discuss the case, and had no chance to add my point of view. I felt like I had entered a world where people who had been caught at the lowest point of their lives were fed into the machinery of justice. I was the proverbial fly on the wall. The jury system humanizes the process. It requires 12 people to agree in order to convict or acquit. One holdout results in a mistrial, forcing the prosecutor to decide whether to re-try with a new jury. The jury system is the safeguard against wrongful conviction.
The last time I went I was selected for the first round of questions. When they called my name the judge looked up and asked if I was Mary Ann Edic’s son. When I said yes he talked to me about working with her at his law firm and asked me to convey his greetings. All this in front of about 60 people. So I knew I would not get picked. It was a murder trial involving a shooting. Two people in my group had recently lost sons to similar shootings but both said they could be unbiased. The lawyers were openly skeptical. They did not get picked.
There did not end up being a trial- the suspect confessed the next morning.