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   jury duty, 2015
Monday, August 3 2015

location: greenhouse upstairs, rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York

Before we'd left for the Adirondacks, I'd received a subpoena to appear at the Ulster County Courthouse for a rare American civic obligation: jury duty. The last time I'd been called to serve was in August of 2007, though I'd gotten off easy that time when the defendant failed to appear and I was sent home within an hour, having completed my duty for the next six (or, as it turned out, eight) years. Since I was supposed to show up at the courthouse at 9:00am, I got up early, which wasn't difficult given my recent Adirondack lakehouse schedule. But just to be safe, I'd spent the night in the greenhouse upstairs, which has no shades. This ensured that the sun would play a role in waking me up if nothing else did.
In Uptown Kingston, I parked in the Hannaford parking lot, since that seemed to be the easiest way to park for free all day. I then walked to Hudson Valley Coffee Traders and got a cup of coffee and a cranberry muffin. I know the latter almost certainly wasn't vegan, but I knew I'd be hungry eventually and I didn't want to wait for a bagel to get prepared.
The Ulster County Courthouse was directly across the street from Hudson Valley Coffee Traders. There was no line at the metal detector when I showed up, and the guys running it didn't think it odd that I was taking a laptop computer and a hot cup of coffee to jury duty. The big courtroom on the second floor was filling up when I checked in with the lady out front. I took a seat on one of the benches to the judge's right (though he wasn't there yet). Nobody seemed to care when I opened my laptop, drank coffee, or even when I ate my muffin. I should mention that there turned out to be a very strong public WiFi signal in the courthouse that allowed me to use the web without password or filtering. I hadn't expected that but was delighted.
Before long, a gentleman arrived and proceeded to hold forth at some length about the history of the Ulster County Courthouse and the people (John Jay and George Clinton) who had worked here. According to the gentleman, it is he oldest public building in continuous use in America, and that even before it was built, the site it is on was hallowed by previous history. Back in revolutionary times, Kingston had been the capital of New York, and New York's constitution was ratified here. And, because the United States constitution was largely based on the New York constitution, it could be said that America was born here. Kingston was such a big deal in those times that it was actually a finalist for the site of the capital of the United States. At that point it was time for a quip, "You think the parking today was bad, but..." All of this was to connect us, the potential jurors, to the history of the place and perhaps get us excited about an obligation that many find tiresome and inconvenient.
Eventually well-dressed men who were obviously lawyers arrived, followed soon thereafter by a couple dark-skinned men in crisp button-up shirts who were obviously defendants (this being America, a land whose stereotypes refuse to be subverted). They were escorted by a number of men who looked (and clinked) like jail employees, though it was unclear whether or not the defendants had come from incarceration or were presently out on bail. The judge explained that the case involved charges of handgun possession, which (initially to me) didn't seem serious enough to warrant such an elaborate courtroom production. It was unclear that the crime being discussed had any sort of victim. But New York has strict gun control laws, so I shouldn't have been surprised that this was a felony case. I should mention, by the way, that nearly all the prospective jurors were white. There was a dark-skinned woman with a Muslim surname who looked to be South Indian and there was also a dark-skinned woman with a Hispanic surname, but everyone else was white (aside from a couple black women who showed up later; they were friends of one or both defendants and not prospective jurors). There were no east Asians whatsoever.
After allowing some prospective jurors to leave for medical or reasons of "undue hardship, we were all sworn in as a group. Then the judge cleared out all the people who had taken seats in the jury box so as to make room for groups of potential jurors to be questioned en masse. These groups were 21 in number and included the jury box's twelve seats plus nine more. The process of selecting these potential jurors was referred to by the judge as "filling the box" and involved one of the court's staffers pulling random cards corresponding to jurors from a randomizing tumbler. Once the box was filled, the judge had the prosecution and defense list off the names of everyone in the case, including potential witnesses. Those in the box were asked for a show of hands if anyone knew any of the people named. There was a smattering of raised hands, though few of the jurors thought their personal relationships with people mentioned (mostly people in law enforcement) would affect their ability to be impartial. Anyone with any doubts about their impartiality, though, was excused immediately. Every time a seat opened up in the box, it was filled by a randomly-selected potential juror. In one case a particular seat changed hands something like five times in a row, with potential jurors most often being excused for their biases towards (this crowd being an almost entirely white) law enforcement. Later in the proceedings, there were questions about whether anyone had been a victim of or convicted of a crime, and this caused a huge number of excusals, though often only after the potential juror approached the bench and conferred with the judge and attorneys in relative privacy.
The constant need to fill emptied seats in the box meant that the benches (which date to the 1880s) were emptying out as well. I was particularly pleased when Matthew, the thin, thick-necked red-headed gentleman seated in front of me was called to he box. His deodorant had been straining all morning to mask the unpleasant funk of his body, and by early afternoon I was really not enjoying breathing through my nose. He didn't last long in the box, though I don't remember why he was excused.
A little past 1:00pm, we were all excused for lunch. I headed immediately to Outdated (the hip antique store that is also a vegetarian café), though, from the look of things, few of the other 100+ potential jurors made the same choice. There was, however, one other potential juror in line behind me as I ordered my vegan tempeh sandwich. She was a youngish blonde woman who looked about as similar to a Barbie doll as an actual human being can look. As of lunch time, she was one of the surviving potential jurors in "the box." With her was an older man with a distinguished mane of white hair. Surprisingly, she ordered exactly what I'd ordered.
About a half hour later I saw that Barbie and her older friend had gotten their sandwiches, but so far there was nothing for me, so, fearing I might not be able to eat it in the time available, I went up to the cashier to inquire. That's what it took; the sandwich was delicious.
Back in the courtroom, the proceedings continued. Questionnaires were handed out to everyone in the box and each had to read their answers aloud. It was a fascinating dump of biographical information from completely random strangers. How many opportunities does one have to see random people and then get a glimpse into their lives: their marital status, their number of children, the length of time they've lived in the area, their associations and clubs, their jobs, their educations, and what their spouses do. I was struck by the level of education of this random group of 21, only two of whom had only a GED or high school education. A good sprinkling had masters degrees, there were several lawyers (but no doctors), and there was even one who said he was a physicist. Barbie's menu choices made sense once she claimed "Catskill Animal Sanctuary" as one of her associations. Later it would turn out that the older man I'd seen her with was her father, a judge who works in that very same courthouse.
After the last question had been asked by the judge, the lawyers were free to take some time to ask their own. For the most part, they addressed the potential jurors as a whole, though sometimes they would single out an individual juror (whom they kept track of with some sort of hand-drawn cheatsheet). Each of the defendants had his own lawyer, though one of these was a public defender. The public defender initially seemed clever and alert, but as he asked increasingly strident and repetitive questions, I began to wonder if perhaps he was jacked up on some sort of illegal stimulant.
After the last question had been asked, the lawyers (both defense and prosecutorial) were allowed to confer and strike people from the box. In the end, both sides had agreed to keep 11 of the 21 potential jurors. Distressingly, anyone with a masters degree or legal training was excused, including Barbie (a lawyer). I was sure the squirrely-looking gentleman covered with textual tattoos and sporting one of those thin beard-mustache combos was a gonner (he looked like his attitude would be one of "fuck the police"), but he stayed, as did everyone else with a high school education or less.
Now the court only needed one more juror and two alternates, but to get that, they completely filled the box again with 21 fresh faces, and again I avoided getting called up. By this point, there were only about 20 potential jurors left on the benches, meaning our chance of having been called had been greater than 80%. The judge repeated the process he'd done with the first box, though he proceeded much more quickly, since all of us had heard the questions the first time through. Again there were excusals, but this time the judge didn't feel a need to repopulate the empty seats. Brief biographies were presented, the lawyers perfunctorily asked questions, and then the lawyers conferred again on who stayed and who got to go. Not surprisingly, the woman wearing a clearly-racist "Police Lives Matter" teeshirt was ejected, along with everyone else in the back row of the box. But then a middle-aged housewife with a high school education was sworn in as the 12th juror.
For some reason, the process of selecting the two alternates required a third round of lawyerly interrogation even though alternates aren't really all that different from regular jurors. From the remaining potential jurors in the box, two alternates were selected and then, without much fanfair, all the potential jurors in the room (including me) were discharged with the happy news that our jury obligations had been satisfied for the next six years. I'd found the process much more interesting than expected. I appreciated the formalized efficiency of filling the box and replacing jurors as they were excused. And I'd found the window into random human lives unexpectedly delightful.
[REDACTED]
I emerged from the courthouse a little before 5:00pm into a threatening thunderstorm that had started spitting angry drops of rain. I walked as quickly as I could toward Clinton Avenue and broke into a run down Westbrook Lane. I made it to the Prius just as the skies opened up. But I came out from under the downpour after driving less than a mile.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150803

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