On any given day, a blogger out there is likely to be telling us what jury duty is like, and their stories are remarkably similar. It's boring. It's a "quiet and dull day", says a typical post, enlivened only by an ambulance arriving to help someone who had passed out. There is plenty of time to be thoughtful:
Surrounding are people of all walks of life: old, young, employed, unemployed, etc. Newspapers ruffle from a variety of directions. A cough here and there, a sniffle turn into a small chorus echoing the original sound.
Plenty of time to wish for escape: "It appears that the first list [of names read by the clerk] let people leave. Damn, damn." Mounting resentment:
The rest of the afternoon was spent sitting there listening to interview after interview. It was horrible. I fell asleep so many times it's not even funny; and it was so uncomfortable I couldn't even concentrate on the book I had brought.
It's about lunch
What lawyers don't understand is how much jury service is about lunch. The descriptions of lunch in these entries are far more detailed than the descriptions of the lawyers, whether lunch was bad ("the blandest tasting grilled cheese sandwich ever") or good ("I opted for [Salumi's] porchetta (roast pork stuffed with sausage meat and spices), which was sensational-- especially with the crusty bread slathered in garlicky olive oil.") And when another juror's blog already centers on her weight-loss journey, it's not surprising that her description of jury duty mentions no lawyers at all, but only what she ate.
Other savvy jurors plan ahead, and post questions about local restaurants, the answers to which (at least a dozen) make you want to head straight for the lunch spots surrounding the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building.
If you want to be dull, don't explain
One thing we know from mock trials is that jurors take their role seriously and want to perform it well. So why all this boredom and resentment?
I have to think in part it is connected to another pattern you see in news stories about jury service: people don't understand why we're asking the questions we do. A news story today about the Avery jury selection started by explaining why the lawyers might possibly want to ask jurors whether they do puzzles. The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey argued in an op-ed piece yesterday that asking civil jurors to answer 24 "biographical questions" such as "prospective jurors' favorite television shows and whether they have any bumper stickers on their vehicles — and, if so, what they say" is "inappropriate" and "a waste of everyone's time."
There's room at the top
If jury service is, as we're being told here, an hours-long stretch of unexplained and inexplicable boredom, surely there's an opportunity here. If the day suddenly changed when you stood up - if you were the lawyer who made the experience make sense, and made jurors see their own role as important, you would have done something powerful - for them, as well as for your case.
There are jurors in the box waiting for you to be interesting. If you doubt it, read these two recent posts. Peter, the guy who had porchetta at Salumi, tells us "This was the only part of the trial where jurors got to actively engage with the attorneys. What a blast!" (I bet the lawyer he was engaging with was good.) And there is David, a 21-year-old man who journals his life with cerebral palsy:
Because of my low stamina, need for help going to the bathroom, pain with prolonged sitting, inability to handwrite, and need for help with eating, I had valid reasons to get out of serving. What's more, it's always such a hassle to have to prove myself and advocate for myself in a new setting. It was very tempting [to] excuse myself. However, I decided to give it a try because I had heard that jury duty was a good learning experience, and I thought it would be a way for me to contribute.
If David can show up for jury duty, I can darn well try to make it matter.
All this leads to a voir dire question you may not have considered: "Do you blog? Tell me about your blog."