I got my first experience today with jury duty, and what an experience it was. Reported to the courthouse at 8:30am. 71 of us in the jury pool and we were stuffed in this room that had about enough seats for 50 people while we waited to go and hear about the case and have a jury selected. I got there early enough to get a seat. So we are all hanging out and this lady probably 25 yrs old or so comes in who is about 350lbs. She stands right next to where I am sitting and is huffing and puffing from having walked up one whole flight of stairs. She makes some comment about not being very good at standing and she is clearly hinting for me and/or the guy behind me to give up our seat to her. Fuck that, I am not giving up my seat to someone 10 years younger than me just because she loves cheeseburgers too much and her knees are hurting. The guy behind me apparently felt the same way because we both kept our seats until we moved locations.
Then we got this real annoying lady in the middle of everything that owns a daycare and has no one to watch her daycare today and there is supposedly some state visitor coming today to do an inspection. She is freaking out and telling everyone that she cannot stay. No one listens to her and the county clerk just tells her that it will be dealt with during jury selection. More on her in a minute.
So we finally at like 9:20am we are told it is time to line up and head into the court room to be questioned and have a jury chosen. We make our way into a courtroom and amazingly everyone gets a seat, of course we are so close together that we can tell what everyone had for breakfast. Once we get seated the attorneys and defendant are all introduced and we are told the specifics of the case. Then from about 9:30am to 12:30am we are bombarded with every question know to man. Do you know anyone involved with the case? Have you ever experienced anything that would prohibit you from being unbiased? Blah Blah Blah. They even asked us if any one of us owned a shihtzu dog?
The victim in the case owned/loved a shihtzu dog and the attorney thought that anyone that was sympathetic in that love might not able to be unbiased in rendering a decision. WTF is that?
Now back to annoying daycare lady. As the attorneys are asking all of these questions her cell phone (which we were not supposed to have in the court room) goes off. And this nutcase ANSWERS the phone and starts talking on her phone in the middle of everything. I thought the judge was going to loose it. She then says that she has a dire emergency at her daycare and needs to be excused. He stared at her for a few secs and then I think he decided we would all be better off with her gone, so he instructs the attorneys that unless they had any objections she was going to be removed from the list and she was free to leave. Now she was stuck way in the back and in the middle of a row so she has to climb over all these people and finally makes her way out.
It was quite the scene.
At 12:30 with the attorneys still going strong on questions finally someone raises their hand and asks if we could please have a bathroom break. The judge asks the attorneys how much longer they have and they said maybe 20-30 mins. So he says we can have 5-10 mins to go to the bathroom. At least 20 mins later everyone finally gets back to their seats and the attorneys start back up and I shit you not they ask 2 more questions and sit down saying they are finished. Again, I thought the judge was going to stare a hole in the one guy. If he had only a couple more questions then why say 20-30 mins? We could have finished that up and gotten a bathroom break when they released us for lunch. So the judge releases us for lunch and tells us to be back in an hour. So we all go our separate ways and come back in an hour. When we get back we have to sit in the same room we started with not enough seats. 45 mins later finally we are all brought back into the courtroom and the 12 jurors are named and the rest of us are allowed to go home. I was never so thankful to get out of a place in my life. Sadly tho we were told we had to come back on March 19th for another trial.
Our justice system at work.
_________________
"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away." Frank Coztansa wrote:
I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.
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. The judge asks me if I have had any life experiences with drugs that would make it difficult to be an impartial judge. I tell the judge & the other 100 people in the room that I lost someone who was very close to me to addiction, & that a couple who we have been friends with for 30 years has a family member who is in prison for 25 years for driving a semi truck that contained a few hundred pounds of weed. I then tell the judge that I have very strong feelings about guns & drugs, & she asks me to elaborate. I tell her that I have no tolerance for guns, drugs or repeat criminals. 
