Jury Duty

March 17th, 2009 · No Comments

I had jury duty the last two days. I was thrilled and wanted nothing more than to be on a trial. The way it works is, your name gets assigned to a group with a number. The first 12 people in the group are in the jury until otherwise. Today I made the cut at 12. I was *thrilled*. It was a civil case, aka lawsuit involving a motor vehicle accident. The defense admitted to guilt but they didn’t admit to any damages from the accident. That is why we were there.

Anyway, the first question was – How did we feel when we heard what this case was about? Being the observant person that I am, I noticed the injured party was not in the court room. I said I was curious about what happened and how injured they were. Only a couple others shared this view with me though. I thought that was very odd.

I believe my jury experience was essentially over at that point. 80% of the others thought most lawsuits were a waste of time/money. They thought they were stupid. They thought they needed to cap the rewards. And then someone brought up the McDonald’s case. Multiple people said that it was frivolous and that the women needed to talk some personal responsibility.

I am all for personal responsibility but McDonald’s needed to take some too. The coffee was 180-190 degrees. The woman had third degree burns from the coffee. I of course said something about this. I guess that was a mistake also.

Anyway, I was the first person tossed off the jury. There was another person that was kept on the jury and he wasn’t able to complete a sentence. He also looked like he was straight out of jail which is possible because he raised his hand when he said he didn’t like the justice system.

I think I would have been very fair. I am a pretty factual based person. I can see both sides to it.

Oh well, I fail. Fired from jury duty.