The dreaded Jury Summons.
Stored in my purse for a month.
The day comes - bitter cold and snowing during a record-breaking worst week of winter weather in Fort Worth. My never-before used navigation phone app gets me downtown, then fails me after I get hopelessly lost trying to find an open parking garage close enough to the courtroom that I won't freeze to death or get lost before finding my way to the cattle call. I give up, trying to ignore the sweet Navi voice telling me to turn left on a right-only street, praying I find a road I recognize and the city hasn't rerouted it completely since I was downtown for jury duty over 10 years ago. Lancaster! I-30! An exit for University! I'm headed home with a stabbing headache and slight dizziness that started overnight with the rollercoaster temperatures.
Thanks to laundry, my day is not a total loss as I nurse my allergy symptoms, content in the knowledge that if the city really needs me to dispense a trial verdict, they know where I live and can give me a ride downtown. I whisper a prayer of gratitude for getting home safely on slick roads filled with crazed drivers seeking escape from the cabin fever of school closures, and the fact that I don't have to spend most of the day packed with other sardines waiting to get dismissed. Or, in the case of one of my jury summons adventures, completely forgotten.
Story Time: Over a decade ago, when I was homeschooling and being summoned for jury duty regularly every 2 years, I waited with 300-400 people in a room with Fire Department warnings that we were sitting (some of us on the floor or in the restroom) in a room with a designated Occupancy of 212 (or some such, lower, number), until two dozen of us were told to return after lunch. Dutifully, we did so, after paying more for lunch than the whole $7 the city would be generously bestowing upon us (and declared to the I.R.S.) at the end of the day. Two hours later, a janitor entered the courtroom, incredulously asking, "What're y'all still doin' here?!" Apparently, the judge had telepathically dismissed us hours ago. In another instance, I was chosen for a jury pool, told to return the next day, then, once seated, informed that the plaintiff had settled the case. "Have a nice day!"
Why have I been summoned so regularly and others I know NEVER been summoned? My twin sister, for instance, who lives for Court TV, has never received jury summons. Why do we continue to allow such an inefficient system of jurisprudence?!
Besides disrupting the lives and economies of millions of people in the vast and various jurisdictions of our nation each day, those that arrive are disgruntled and disagreeable. I would wager than the majority of the people inconvenienced by a jury summons on any given day are ignorant of much of the law they may be expected to adjudicate! Why does our legal system persist in requiring angry, uninformed citizens to sit on juries?
We pay judges to oversee trials, entrusting them with the knowledge of the law without bias. Why can't we have professional jurors, whose job is to be willing, available and educated, to serve responsibly on juries? This practical solution, in no way deprives the accused of "a jury of his peers", and may even render more just decisions, delivered by those that have higher aspirations than merely getting home before supper
(without getting lost).
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