Today, my fellow jurors and I heard the fifth day of testimony in the case. Today, my fellow jurors and I watched as the courtroom turned into A/V Club, with videos and x-rays and dry-erase drawings. Today, my fellow jurors and I debated, in all seriousness, the proper medical terminology for butt-igue.

Today, I stood in the doorway of the jury room after lunch and went through my pockets and found a few bills. I counted the bills — nine dollars. I held up the money and asked my fellow jurors in a plaintive tone if one of them would please kill me for nine dollars. And God bless them, they all had the same response, to wit: “I’ll kill you for free if it’ll get us out of here.”

That, in answer to your question, is how jury duty “is going.”

As I mentioned in the previous installment, the judge tells us each and every time we leave the courtroom — and we leave the courtroom four or five times a day; I’ll get into that shortly — not to discuss the case, so I can’t discuss the particulars of the trial. Also, the court officer collects our notes at the end of each day, so most of my best material is in a file folder on the court clerk’s desk anyway. But I can give you my overall impressions of the experience of serving on a jury in a civil suit. I’ll start with a bit of background information on how New York conducts civil cases, and how that differs from what you (and I) might have seen on TV.

A panel for a civil action differs, at least in New York State, from that of a criminal action in that the jury consists of six people and two alternates; on a criminal case, the jury numbers twelve plus two alternates. The alternates hear all testimony with the rest of us, but then go “on standby” during deliberations; they function as understudies in case one of the “real” jurors takes ill during the trial, or goes stark raving crazy from boredom (which, as anecdotal evidence I have collected over the last week suggests, happens more often than you’d think). So, in the courtroom, there’s the jury; the judge; the attorneys for plaintiff and defendant; the court clerk, who may or may not use the courtroom as his office; the court officer or bailiff; and the court reporter. Also present if they wish, but not required to attend: the plaintiff; the defendant; their supporters; witnesses who have already testified. Witnesses who have not yet testified sit in a row of chairs outside the courtroom.

On TV courtroom dramas, the courtrooms look old and well-appointed and like they reek of ancient dignity — lots of wood paneling and leather chairs and marble. Sometimes that’s what New York Supreme Court looks like (and by the way, that’s the name for all city, state, and federal courts down here; what you might think of as a supreme court, with a panel of judges that rules on the decisions of lower courts, is in Albany, the state capitol, and is referred to by those in law or law enforcement as “the appellate court” or “the appellate division”), but more often, the surroundings look more modest. The building we went to for jury selection last week used to do duty as an office building; jury selection for civil cases used to take place at 5 World Trade, so obviously they had to make other arrangements. The court complex where we hear testimony is also a re-purposed office building, but of older vintage, which used to house the DMV. Right up the street, you’ll find the schmancy columned buildings you see on Law & Order, but the building we go to each day is fairly bland and not all that, uh, courtly. The courtroom is set up the way you’d think — enter at the back, with the bench ahead of you and the witness stand to the right of that; jury box along the right-hand wall; attorneys’ tables facing the bench to the left, and the gallery behind that — but it’s also got fluorescent lighting and a heater that sounds like a band of elves is inside it crushing beer cans, and a space heater as well. Way off in the corner, there’s a bluff of file cabinets, and on top of the hindmost file cabinet perches a gigantic tin of shortbread cookies, and I mean “gigantic” — it’s a good foot and a half in diameter. So, the milieu is not all that imposing in our case, but if you watch any Court TV, you’ll know that most courtrooms look like the one we drew. It’s the process that’s imposing, really, but again, it’s not like what you might expect. More on that in a bit.

The most irritating thing about jury duty, I find, is that it throws my whole schedule off. I work at home, which gives me flexibility, but there’s still a certain amount of work that must get done. Starting that work at five-thirty in the evening is not a huge hardship in and of itself, but when I’ve already put in a full day downtown, it’s tiresome in all senses of that word to have to start all over at what most people consider the end of the workday. So, I’ve devised various workarounds. My day on jury duty starts at seven — no, not a hardship for most of you, but keep in mind that I stay up doing my actual job until two or three most mornings, and that my body is therefore accustomed to getting up at nine or ten. I get out of bed, run through a shower, start the coffee while brushing my teeth, attire myself in something that “shows respect to the court” (that’s actually in the printed version of the Jurors’ Handbook), and knock off a bunch of email and MBTV forums and guzzle coffee before I have to leave to catch the train at 9:10.

Then I pack my bag. As a third-generation Girl Scout, I don’t travel without the bare minimum of Filofax, emergency kit (Band-Aids, condoms, ibuprofen, Maalox, hair clips, lipstick, Chapstick, mascara, pocket mirror, and antihistamines), reading materials, writing materials, extra Kleenex and camels, eyeglasses, earplugs (don’t ask), street map, and cell phone, so I make sure all that stuff is up to date and then throw in bottled water, two packs of gum, and an extra something to read just in case. I take all the change out of my pockets to save time at the metal detector. Smokes? Check. Mittens? Check. Keys? Check. Let’s wait for the elevator and get on the 6 train.

I get on the 6 train and take it to the end, Brooklyn Bridge City Hall. That puts me in the neighborhood at about 9:35. I smoke a cigarette and walk down to the building, where I dig out my orange jury pass and go through the security checkpoint. Then it’s on to the jury room, where I have to report by 9:45. I got there first today, but usually a few of the others who live on the west side of the island have already showed up by the time I get there. (Juries in Manhattan consist only of Manhattanites, by the way.)

We sit around for awhile. Now and then, the court officer looks in to do a head count, but usually, we just wait until around 10:30. We’ve become like the world’s largest married couple; we lounge around drinking coffee and reading each other tidbits from the local papers. Topics for discussion today included Prince Harry, referred to in hilarious fashion by the Daily News as “liquor-swilling,” and how the press should give him a break; if the Yankees will try to sign that 32-year-old Little League scandal kid from last year; a murder that took place on Cape Cod last week, the victim of which one of the jurors knows vaguely; the fact that even people who hated Tolkien books as a kid will like the Lord of the Rings movie anyway, because some of those Tolkien-haters very much enjoy Viggo Mortensen, even when he’s not getting naked; and whether it feels like it’s 46 degrees out. We don’t discuss the case itself, but we have agreed on nicknames for the participants based on famous people they resemble. And we have certainly agreed that, if the case doesn’t conclude by Friday, we will revolt.

Just when we’ve made up our minds to stretch out on the floor and go back to sleep, the court officer opens the door and says, “Okay, then,” and we gather up our notebooks and line up in the hall. We always have to sit in the same seats and file in in the same order, and by now, we have preordained spots against the wall where we stand, regardless of whether the rest of the jury has come out of the room yet. My spot is just ahead of the door. Once we’ve lined up, the court officer opens the door to the courtroom and says, “Please rise as the jurors enter the courtroom.” Despite the fact that we trundle in and out of there a good five or six times a day, at least, he says the same thing every time, and everyone — witnesses, the court reporter, everyone — but the judge stands up every time. Usually, someone who failed to stand up in a timely fashion, or who sat down before we did, gets snapped at; they take the standing-for-the-jury thing very seriously.

We usually hear about an hour of testimony, depending on sidebars and “business conducted outside the jury’s hearing.” There’s a break at around 11:30. We smoke, visit the bathroom, and complain about how much we hate the chairs in the jury box. Another hour of testimony. Then at around 12:45, it’s lunchtime. The other jurors go out to lunch together most days; since the 6 train takes me almost door to door, I go home, dash through a bit of email and administrative crap, and get back on the train after half an hour to get back to the jury room at 2:15. Then it’s more or less the same schedule in the afternoon: go in at 2:45, break at 3:40, back in at 4:10 for another half an hour, and then that’s it for the day.

But there’s a lot of downtime — a lot of downtime. I like to read and chat with people, but the fact is, that downtime isn’t downtime for me; it’s time I should spend working. Every minute we spend in the jury room because an attorney isn’t prepared, or sitting around shooting the shit because a witness is late, is a frustrating wasted minute for me. Internet access is impossible, for several reasons. I would try to get a bit of writing done, but it’s a loud building and I don’t want to seem more antisocial than I already do by bailing on lunch every day. And the chairs in the jury box…I can’t say enough bad things about them. If it’s a strategy on the part of the court to keep us awake because we can’t get comfortable, well, kudos — it’s working.

Beyond that, I shouldn’t go. I will say that it is like what you see on TV, sort of, and yet it isn’t. It’s pretty prosaic, most of it, but sometimes there’s shouting. When a lawyer registers an objection, it’s generally for reasons inscrutable to the jury; they don’t usually say why, although sometimes it’s obvious (and when it’s obvious, it’s usually for leading the witness). There’s a lot of time spent on “housekeeping” — entering documents into evidence, dealing with stipulations, positioning of exhibits — that of course you don’t see on a law drama because it’s, for the most part, boring and undramatic.

Stay tuned for the “dramatic” conclusion, in which Your Friend’s Incredibly Cool Mom reveals a titillating secret, Super George goes missing, Dr. Derek Jeter confounds a cross-examination, and Crash Davisberg visits the set of ER!

January 14, 2002

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