Jury Duty, continued
What a day. Show up and wait, and wait and wait! Finally, at 4:40 the 90 or so of us that were left were told to go home and report again tomorrow.
When the announcement was finally made, there were enough groans and comments that the Clerk threatened to call security. Apparently, Judge Lee was in the middle of jury selection in a criminal case and running out of prospective jurors.
Well, his Honor should have started jury selection earlier in the day!
November 30th, 2005 at 1:53 am
You’re a lawyer and all this surprises you? Having been summoned to jury duty a number of times (and served once), I’ve always thought it’s a wonder that every juror at every trial isn’t so p-ss-d off by how they are treated that they don’t just flat refuse to play the game and reach a verdict. You can be sure the lawyers and judges and pretty much everybody connected with the trial but the jurors gets treated with respect and gets a place to park. But the jurors, in the end, are just the poor dumb jerks who decided to play along with the system and show up. Why should they be treated like anything other than cattle?
November 30th, 2005 at 5:43 am
This is just not the situation everywhere.
OK, so we don’t have courthouses with courtrooms on seven floors and at least five different juries being selected from the same jury pool, but in Iowa, jury members are treated with a lot more consideration than I experienced in Tucson.
I was able to locate the Court Calender (not everyone would know where to look for it, nor realize that it is public information) and saw that Judge Lee had Motions in the morning. It also appears that the criminal case he is presiding over has three defendants, no doubt with three sets of lawyers plus the County Attorney. That alone increases voir dire by a factor of three.
Jury selection in this case should have started the first thing in the morning. The Court Administrator, and to some extent, the Judge is at fault in creating the avoidable situation of yesterday.