I have a good relationship with the doormen in my building. We chit-chat about baseball; we gossip about the other people in the building. I don’t tell anyone when I round a corner and see them smoking guiltily in the downstairs hallway, and they in turn keep diplomatically silent about my periodic wine-drenched staggering through the lobby at four in the morning. So I found it a mite odd one day in December when Sead, probably the friendliest guy on the staff, practically hurled my mail at me and then dived down behind the counter as if reacting to sniper fire that only he could hear.

“Sead? The hell?”
“[Mrrffh.]”
“Did you drop someth — AAAAAAAAAAACK!”

Yep. Jury duty summons. No wonder he’d hit the deck.

“You can get up now, Sead.”
“Heh. Heh heh. Jury duty, huh? Heh heh please don’t hurt me I have a wife.”
“Yes. Jury duty. Jury…duty.”

I ripped open the summons. Sead, who had risen to a tentative half-crouch, blanched and sank below the counter again.

“Wh-whaaaat? WHAT? What the HELL does ‘MUST SERVE’ mean? ‘MUST SERVE’? Please! Okay, so I postponed service half a dozen times with bogus excuses — now I actually have to, like, GO DOWN THERE and DO IT? Ohhhh no, no no no no no, I don’t THINK so. ‘Must serve,’ my ass. Like they’d arrest me or something.”
“[Mrrgglllppff.]”
“They’d ARREST me? For not going to JURY DUTY? Says WHO?”

Sead’s hand, trembling slightly, appeared over the top of the counter. I stuffed the summons into it, folded my arms, and tapped my foot. The hand spread the summons out on the counter, and one finger pointed to a section which read, in teeny print, “Show up for jury duty or we’ll arrest your postponing ass, Bunting. Love, The Division Of Jurors. P.S.: Says us.”

I snatched the summons back. The top of Sead’s head hovered near the edge of the counter.

“Well, that’s that then. I guess there’s only one thing to do.”
“[Mfffllrrff?]”

And so it came to pass that I pitched myself full-length on the floor of the lobby, pounded my fists, kicked my feet, and wailed “NOOOOOOO I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna MOOOOOMMMEEEEE” for ten minutes.

I cannot abide jury duty. I’ve only gone once before, but I dare you to show me a more egregious waste of the time of everyone involved. No, I didn’t think so. And don’t start in all “unique American system of justice” this and “jury of your peers” that and “civic duty” the other thing, because it’s not the concept I have an issue with. I believe in participating in the system, especially since exposure to high doses of Law & Order (and, alas, to law students as well) has made me a de facto scholar of said system. I like the idea of jury duty, actually…in theory.

It’s the unbelievably boring, inefficient, antiquated, impracticable, and excruciatingly smoke-free execution that I can’t stand. The jury clerks give every impression of having shown up for work fresh from other careers entirely, careers entirely unrelated to the law, or for that matter to the mastery of such notions as the correct order of the English alphabet and the difference between “left” and “right.” Sight-reading names, which jury clerks must do all day, every day, as part of the job? Not their strength. Speaking clearly and audibly so that a roomful of people may hear them and follow directions? Not so great with that, either. Getting on with it already for fuck’s sake? Not going to happen. Not here. Not today. Not on jury duty.

So, there’s a lot of sitting and reading, which I don’t mind so much. There’s a lot of shuffling in and out of various rooms, waiting for various people who outrank you in the system to figure out what they want done with you, which I don’t mind so much either. It’s the open-endedness of it that drives me crazy. Sure, a morning spent reading is fine, as long as it’s just one morning; I have a business to run. But no, you don’t know when it’s going to end, when they’ll see fit to send you home, how long you’ll have to spend huddled in a doorway on your cell phone during the lunch hour, how many more days of getting home and starting your work day at five-thirty you have to dread, and in the meantime, you have to line up, do roll call, sit, get up, sit somewhere else, do another roll call, go out to lunch, come back in and stand around in line for the security check, sit, do yet another roll call, get up, sit somewhere else, and finally, after six fucking hours of study hall for grown-ups, they do you the favor of putting you on a panel for voir dire.

And if you think the jury clerks don’t know their butts from a hole in the ground, just wait until you start dealing with the attorneys. Years of schooling designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, months of briefs and motions and whatever else to get to this point in the trial process, and you have to tell them how to pronounce “Bunting.” BUNTING. Karl Krysznicki, sitting next to me? No problem. Prot Dineyapranda, two rows behind? Piece of cake. Sarah Bunting, the easiest, clearest, WASPiest, most basic Saxon name in the goddamn Reading For Fetuses library? Four syllables, six lawyers, total chaos. I had to repeat it for them twice. Did that stop one of them from repeatedly referring to me as “Sandra Dee Bunting”? No, it sure didn’t.

And voir dire itself…well, actually, it’s civil court, so it’s a lot shorter and less agonizing than criminal voir dire, which I find particularly infuriating because the vast majority of the criminal caseload in Manhattan consists of drug cases, and because I have an eight-year-old drug arrest, the assistant D.A. wants no part of me, and I end up wondering why they bothered calling me down there in the first place if they don’t think I can tell the difference between a law and thinking that a law is kind of dumb. But it still goes on FOR. EVER. The name mangling, the scuffling over the seating chart — and did I mention that the lawyers can’t figure out a seating chart, either? Because they can’t. And, sadly, someone somewhere is paying them $350 an hour to exhibit the spatial-relations skills of a retarded goat trussed in masking tape — the endless droning questions and answers about have you ever sued anyone or gotten sued or heard about someone getting sued or known anybody named Sue or yelled “soooooey” at a pig, can you hear evidence and remain fair, can you dislike lawyers and remain fair, have you ever gone to a county fair or paid a subway fare, blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH. The room is just that little bit too warm, and you don’t really want to get picked for this jury, or for any other jury, for that matter, but if you don’t get picked, you’ll wind up back in the bullpen and God knows you don’t want to perform yet another rendition of “no, no, see — ‘Bun,’ like hot cross buns? ‘Ting.’ Bunting. Like baseball. Like the bird. LIKE LEARNING TO READ.”

But of course I got picked for a jury. And I felt at that point that I could remain fair; both sets of attorneys annoyed me equally. The attorneys gathered up seventeen reams of paperwork, told us to expect a five- or six-day trial, and slithered out of the room. My fellow jurors and I went home to gird our loins for boredom.

The trial began yesterday. Every time we leave the courtroom, the judge reminds us not to discuss the case with anyone, so I can’t really get into details here, not yet — I probably shouldn’t even write this much — but stay tuned to this space for more of my scintillating adventures in non-crime.

January 9, 2002

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