Yet another reason to hate this miserable little village. No where on the web do they list the phone-in line to find out who is on jury duty tomorrow. No where in the phone book do they list that number. If you call the court you just get a lovely recording telling you they aren’t open, giving you no options such as “press 1 to connect to the jury pool hotline.” Instead it is a machine from the 50’s that sounds like a good scratchy cassette tape recording spoken with an accent I can’t really understand.
Now, as you can guess, I’m heading off to jury duty tomorrow like a good little Indian. If I don’t dress conservatively the judge said he may throw potential jurors in to prison for the day. You have to look like a good Virginia old-school boy. In the courtroom they keep the jurors lined up like targets in front of the judge. If anyone in the courtroom pulls a gun, the judge just ducks right below us worthless jurors. The judge can also sit there watching us from behind which is good for watching us take notes (if we are brave enough…see ahead).
For the training session they showed us a video that was clearly made on a PC by a monkey. It was brainless. It hurt to watch. It warned me about five times to not feel discouraged if I get rejected by either the defense or prosecution. Discouraged? Try happy as hell if I don’t have to find out why smoking Billy Bob wants $10k for his car because Joe Billy left a cigarette smoking in it as he watched NASCAR on his cousins TV set.
The video also went in to depth about what you can do as a juror. You are allowed to take notes if you wish, but it is highly discouraged. Note taking can distract you from the case (is that why teachers make you take notes?). At the end of every day you have to turn your notes in. At the end of the case your notes will be given back to you. Why do they discourage this? I guess jurors would get bored to tears and start playing tic-tac-toe. Note takers tend to be the ones that did well in school. They are usually the sharp ones. Lawyers don’t like sharp tacks.
As soon as I mention the word nuclear and PhD during jury selection tomorrow I have a feeling both sides will reject me. Lawyers have never met a smart person they like. At least there is a new lawyer joke every day. I wonder if I mention this tomorrow they’ll laugh…or throw me in prison. Prison or Charlottesville…hmmm…
Oh well. I’ll be sure to blog about anything of interest that happens.
I wasn’t excited about jury duty, but I showed up at the court. They make you sit around for an hour. I wear business casual while others are wearing Anthrax T-shirts and torn sweat-pants. Let’s be polite and dress respectfully in a court.
I was fortunate, the case I was on settled and I only wasted 90 minutes of my life. Then I took the rest of the day off. After all, we get the day off for jury duty!
Ahem.
Where is waldo? (the second image cracks me up) A pity that number doesn’t correspond to what they enforce on the handout they provide at the training session. They also list a different cash amount. The best thing is they tax you on it. I wonder if I can refuse their pittance offering, or just donate the money to some charity outside of this rural stick.
My other favorite thing about the courthouse was walking through the metal detector with a computer in my bag. I was told to remove my hat, but not a beep out of the detector. I guess computers don’t have enough metal in them…or maybe it recognized it as a Mac so it was impressed I wasn’t running one of those PC’s (piles of yada…) that they use in the courtroom. Maybe no one turned on the detector. Maybe it was another power outage that is so frequent here in the village.
As for dress, since it is supposed to be a jury of peers, and the people getting tried are criminalistic smokers, shouldn’t I just try to match that style? Perhaps a nice orange sack.
I was an alternate juror on the good old Messenger case years ago. Doctor/father kills own child..made in to a TV movie. Maybe I’ll get something fun like that…or maybe just a case that would put VA to death for killing millions with their fine product of cigs. Just 3 million/year die. That’s almost nothing…right?
Go NBC…rock on with the HD Olympics + HD commercials.
Jury info line for Charlottesville Circuit Court: 961-9894