Jury Duty: Outside the Courtroom
Up in the building, we formed two lines in the hallway and waited outside our courtroom. It was about 24 of us in total, and we all stood against two sides of the hallway, sort of facing one another. We were waiting for what seemed like 5-10 minutes, in almost total silence. The entire hallway area was devoid of anyone else save us.
After a few minutes, I started joking out loud that I felt really nervous, but couldn’t understand why. A few others chuckled, and most said they felt the same. We were all about to embark on something, and few of us knew what exactly would happen next.
When we were finally called into the court room, it was a pretty sudden shift. The room itself was large, with very high ceilings. Lawyers were sitting at tables, the judge was seated at the bench, and we were all told to spread out and sit in the seats in back.
Each group then took a turn in the jury box, and was asked a series of questions. Most were related to personal history, and a few were questions meant to determine whether or not we could be impartial for the specific case at hand.
All we knew at the onset was that one man was taking a police officer to court. “Excessive force” was one of the terms cited, but that’s all I remembered from the specific charges.
The entire questioning process (per potential juror) was about 5-6 minutes in total. Multiply that by about thirteen people and going through an entire jury box takes a little while. Interestingly… while I got a little stiff just sitting around on a bench, I was pretty engaged and interested in the whole process. There was waiting to be done, but no one else was reading – inside the courtroom, everyone was paying attention to what was happening.
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