You only have to know me for about 5 minutes to know that a passion of mine is politics. But this isn't going to be a post about politics. You only have to know me for about 10 minutes to know that while I love the country in which I live, I also am well aware of the fact that we do a lot of stuff wrong. But this isn't going to be a post about American exceptionalism.
Early in the summer of 2010, I got served with my notice for federal jury duty. Given I was getting married, planning a honeymoon and in the midst of a huge work project, I wrote a letter asking for my service to be postponed and it was. Fast forward to about 6 weeks ago and I received notice that I was to appear on April 4th at the federal court building in Philadelphia. I will be honest, I didn't want to go. This was going to be a huge pain in the ass and I had "better" things to do with my time.
I appeared on Monday morning and I was immediately annoyed by the lack of organization, communication and efficiency in the process. I spent Monday sitting in a cold room reading my book and thinking this was going to be a total waste of time. At the end of the day I was told I had to report again on Tuesday. When I appeared on Tuesday, I knew I was in trouble. There were only 31 folks there so we all knew we'd be called up to court as potential members of a jury. We went through the voir dire process and when all was said and done -- yours truly was Juror #8. And thus began the important work.
There are a few things that one can do in this country that are truly patriotic. Serving your country in the military. Voting. And serving on a jury of one's peers to settle disputes. It was a quick civil trial - 4 days from jury selection to verdict. It was an interesting trial as the incident in question took place at a location that my husband I frequent from time to time. But what struck me most was the fact that everyone took this work very seriously. We began deliberations evenly split in our decision and after 3 hours we were able to come to a consensus that weighed in on the side of the plaintiff but none of us loved that because we could all see both sides of the issue. We all knew that at the end of this - both the plaintiff and defendants lives would change forever. And we knew that we had to make a decision to the best of our ability using the information that we knew from testimony.
I am proud of the work that we did - I hope that all of the parties involved know that we truly made the best decision we could with the information that we had and I hope that all learned some valuable lessons from the experience.
I know that I have.
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