I thought jury duty was for suckers — until I helped save an innocent man from conviction
Jury duty is not a punch line. I helped decide a case about police, a black driver and a traffic stop, and I never felt more significant as a citizen.
The night before I had jury duty, I contemplated searching online for tips on how to get out of it. I knew from pop culture that this was the thing to do.
In “30 Rock,” Liz Lemon dresses up like Princess Leia when called to serve so she will seem insane and be dismissed. In Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life, if you land on jury duty, you lose a turn. Without any reflection, I had come to believe that jury duty was a pain and something most people tried to avoid. It was for suckers.
Then I served on a jury, and my perspective changed.
A quick search on social media for #voting reveals threads about the importance of voting, while searching #juryduty returns posts about the joys of being released from jury duty. As the midterm elections approach, voting is the civic responsibility capturing everyone’s attention and admiration. But jury duty is characterized as something to be avoided at all costs. How is it that we have come to see these two ways of participating in government so differently?
Jury duty shouldn’t be a punch line
When I was called to the criminal court of Cook County, Illinois, I was selected to serve from a group of people looking bored and annoyed and sent to a cramped jury room with a water cooler that was out of water. My fellow jurors were from all over Chicago and the suburbs, from different backgrounds and experiences. Most were as shocked as I was to have been chosen.
We chatted as we waited for paperwork to process and then were summoned to the courtroom. At that point, we didn’t know much about the case, just that the defendant had fled from the scene of a routine traffic stop. Then, we saw the body cam video of one of the police officers, and the mood changed.
You have probably seen a video like this: A traffic stop that escalates quickly. A black man driving. Several police officers surround him. The driver resists the orders he’s given. The officers threaten violence.
The video was 1 minute and 41 seconds long, and the entire time I found myself praying that no one would be shot. No one was. But now it would be our task to decide whether the driver was justified in leaving the scene because he was afraid for his safety.
It was late when we saw the video. Soon we were released for the evening, to return the next day. As we were leaving, our deputy explained that we might want to bring food. She would have lunch for us, but it wouldn’t be good. The state was on a budget.
A younger white man spoke up and said we should do a pot luck. We laughed, imagining bringing Crock-Pots through security. But he was serious. A snack pot luck, he said. I looked at him, wondering just what he had seen in that video, then smiled and nodded.
