under duress

[calimac]

Every day for a week I had to check in at 5 p.m. Every day I was told to check back at 11 a.m. the next morning. Every day at 11 a.m. I was told to check back in at 5. Until today when I was told I was dismissed without further ado. In between, however, I couldn't take any out of town trips, or even be more than an hour away at mid-day, in case I received any other message than "check back in at 5." I could not, for instance, go up to the City for a noon concert, as I'd have liked to do. Or anything else.

What was my crime? Was I on probation? Was I one of those offenders who's shackled to an ankle bracelet GPS monitor?

No, none of those. I was on call for jury duty.

Required public duties seem to consist of two things: voting and jury service. Funny, isn't it, how they're offering more and more flexibility about how and when to do the one, but they still keep you on a leash for a week for the other.

We read a lot concerning obstreperous and uncooperative jurors. It might help if they were treated less like patsies during the trial and less like criminal defendants on bail or probation, at the beck and call of every vagary of the court system's schedule, before it.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The calling is was not a big deal. And in fact they put it on a web site, which makes it even easier. It's being on tenterhooks for a week and having to keep one's life on hold that is a slightly bigger deal.

And I'm not at all convinced that jury duty has anything to do with keeping the barbarians from the gates. Jurors are patsies, I claimed before. The Prop 8 trial was a far more sophisticated and subtle thing because it was being heard before an intelligent judge, and not a jury: at jury trials various things must be omitted, redacted, and simplified, for fear of how these unpredictable amateurs might take it. Which is ironic, because the original point of having jurors was to insert unpredictable amateurishness into the process.