damaged people dot com

I was called back in to jury duty yesterday.

SHOCK, SHOCK!!

I was selected to sit on a jury. I'll be in court all day listening to a case and deciding the fate of someone.

Joy.

Yeah, didn't see your car in this morning so I was wondering if you had gotten picked. Good luck.

My friends teacher is also in jury duty today. So maybe he is in there with you.

I went, heard the case, and did my civic duty by passing judgment on someone I don't know based solely on the "facts" told to me by other people.

If you've never done this, it makes you feel kind of dirty inside.

Deliberation began with a vote of 7 for guilty and 5 for not guilty.

I can say with conviction that old people should never be on juries. They form opinions that are as unshakable as the mountains. If you have an opinion that differs, they take it as a personal attack. My three hours of deliberations weren't exactly fun.

After an hour, the vote was 11 for guilty and 1 for not guilty (and you can guess where I stood... a most uncomfortable position).

After two hours, I was beginning to sway. Not because they hated me for keeping them in there, but because there was one thing in the testimony that bothered me... something the defendant had said. The more we talked about it, the more it bothered me.

I finally changed my vote to guilty. Not because of the pressure, but because I had finally gone beyond reasonable doubt. There's still parts of this case that bother me, but I do feel that real justice was served, and I will sleep just fine tonight.

I'm sure the other jurors still hate me (with the exception of one who changed her vote after an hour... she looked pretty sick about her decision). I can live with that too.

I'm not going to go into all the details, but the defendant was charged with possession of a controlled substance.

Oh for fuck's sake. Please tell me it was not a nickle bag of grass.

It was cocaine.

Well kudos to you for taking it seriously. Even if its difficult to, given the circumstances.