Last week I was called for jury duty.
This is one of those things all the politicians give lip service to. You've heard the cornier, more obvious lines: it's a civic duty, one of those things that makes our country great, etc., etc.
The truth is a little different.
How many people, those with big jobs, or friends in high places, never serve? They have built-in excuses and they use them.
That said, there isn't much financial incentive to be a juror in King County. The pay is $10 a day. That's right, ten dollars a day.
Say you get selected for a longish trial, a murder or a rape. You're sequestered for three weeks. You can't work, and at the end of those three weeks you've made $150.
Since most of the upper classes have already been excused, the people I met in the jury pool room were mostly working folks. They need their wages. Three weeks off and they are hurting.
Pay for jurors hasn't been raised in King County since 1959. That year gas was 20 to 25 cents a gallon. Ten dollars bought 40 to 50 gallons of gas. Now it buys, if you're lucky, three gallons. It might be time for a raise. But hey, why reward anyone for doing their civic duty? It's an honor, right? Right.
I did meet some interesting folks as we waited to be called out to various courtrooms down on Third.
There was the opera singer who'd just returned from Tuscany. There was the Irish-American businessman from Montana with a great sense of humor. There was the lifetime local high school teacher who didn't get chosen for a jury despite telling the judge he had waited 28 years for the privilege of serving. He said a lot of things during jury selection, and evidently talking a lot isn't a quality defense attorneys or prosecutors like much in a prospective juror.
As I've said in this space before, irony is one of God's strong points. Here is one guy in a roomful of people telling the judge hard-luck story after hard-luck story to avoid jury duty, and he who wants to serve can't get arrested, so to speak.
I was questioned and dismissed from two trials. If you're not picked in two days, you get sent home, free from jury duty for at least two years. It was kind of an interesting experience ... and I'm up $20.
The system is better off without me anyway. I would be called repeatedly when I worked in smaller jurisdictions - Idaho and Hawaii - and both sides rushed to dismiss me.
I was a newspaper reporter, and they knew I was not in awe of the justice system. They also knew I not only had opinions about the case in front of me, I'd written articles shaping other people's opinions, too.
An overly informed jury is not necessarily what a good defense attorney is looking for, especially if he knows his client is guilty.
SPEAKING OF THE LAW and those folks who know they are above it, how about that Dick Cheney?
The man who questioned combat vet John Kerry's patriotism, despite having dodged the Vietnam War draft lottery six times, coldly explaining his actions by saying he had other priorities, has told authorities that his office is exempt from oversight by the national archives.
Flunkies of President Bush - that beacon of prying, spying, false patri-otism, another Vietnam War dodger who didn't even bother showing up for his National Guard duties more than half the time - have already claimed his office isn't subject to any oversight either: "We don't need no stinking oversight, man."
These guys started a war with information they knew was false. They gave us the Patriot Act, and now they thumb their noses at democracy yet again, and hardly anyone, other than politicians wishing to push Bush and Cheney away from the trough and get their own snouts in, even notices. The new, Dark Age America is consumed by Paris Hilton's Road-to-Damascus-like conversion.
You can't blame the public. They need something compellingly new now that Anna Nicole Smith has finally been proven to be really, really dead.
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