Law & Order: Civil Court

Now I know how the extras on Perry Mason felt.

A recent day's mail held the modern-day equivalent of the old Selective Service "Greetings". This one, however, came from the County Commisioner of Jurors, and requested my presence at the courthouse for a fun-filled week of jurisprudence.

Of course, the odds were still in my favor. Surely a hundred or more similarly civic-minded citizens were being summoned as well -- after all, my number was 65.

Secure in the "knowledge" that I was off the hook, I completely forgot to call in till bedtime that Sunday night, when my wife said, "Hey, don't you have jury duty tomorrow?" So I dug the instructions out of My Pile, confident that I wouldn't need to go at all... but the recorded announcement said numbers 2-80 should report between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. the next morning.

Unfortunately, I have a hearing problem: if you say "between 8:30 and 9:30", I hear "as the second hand hits 9:29:59". And it would have worked, too... if not for the school bus I met. Or the fact that I parked at the wrong end of the "municipal complex". Or the metal detector at the courthouse door.

In any case, when I got there, the Jury Spiel was already (just, okay?) under way. Even so, walking in I noted that there were perhaps 40 people in the room -- a far cry from the almost 80 I was anticipating.

The orientation process included a video, narrated by (among others) Ed Bradley -- slightly unsettling, as he had only just "signed off for the last time" four days before. The highlight, by far, of the video was a recreation of the practice of Trial By Ordeal of Cold Water, which so neatly parallels the corresponding scene in Monty Python & the Holy Grail that I couldn't help but chortle (and wonder aloud if we would get to practice a similar form of justice).

We had almost completed the video when half of us were summoned to a courtroom, and suddenly I began to get a picture of my true odds: 21 people in the room, choosing 8... and then some guy says, "I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow," and the judge says, "Sure, no problem," and now it's 20. Since everyone's got an equal chance of landing in any of those 8 chairs (and they're all equally stuck), I have an 8/20 chance of being snagged: 40%.

Naturally, I felt a bit smug when 8 names were called and I was missed. And I have to admit, it was pretty entertaining watching them being quizzed, and realizing that some of them were clearly not going to make the final cut -- right up until the penny finally dropped and an inner voice started yelling "dummy, if somebody goes home you're back on the hook!"

Sure enough, 5 stay and 3 go; now it's 12 bodies for 3 seats (25%). Another round of calls, another bullet dodged... before I know it, 12 have been called (the gallery where I'm sitting is starting to look like the stands at a Tampa Bay Devil Rays game), but only 6 chosen: 2 seats left and I'm back to a 25% chance. And then, the hammer falls.

Now we all know there's more than one way to answer a question, and it would have been a simple thing to spin one of those "can you be impartial" kinds of queries to get a free ticket out the door. I felt that several of the dearly departed were very careful to stress attitudes that ensured they would be voted off the island; I decided it would be a worthwhile and interesting experience to stick around, so I played it straight.

Some of those who got the boot actually came after me -- we ended up running through a total of 18 of the group of 20 in order to assemble a panel of 8. And the two who turned right around and went home without even speaking are still excused from jury duty for a minimum of 6 years!

So, as the Book of Genesis would have it, there was an evening and a morning, the first day of my experience as one tooth on one cog in the enormous intertwined system of gears that is Our Justice System. In the next episode of Law & Order: Civil Court, the trial begins!