Grinding slowly
I was inside the criminal justice system all day today (and will be all day tomorrow too): jury duty in state criminal court. Nothing much happened until about 3:30, when ninety of us slowly shuffled down the corridor to a courtroom to hear that a man had been accused of a series of heinous crimes. There was a slight audible gasp from the group of ninety when these crimes were described. The defendant stood up and turned towards us all, and smiled gently.
The judge asked if anyone had any reason why they couldn't serve as jurors. About thirty people lined up and explained why they couldn't, and they were all excused. I couldn't hear all of the excuses clearly — some had to do with the nature of the heinous crimes, and some with the nature of the business that the potential juror ran.
Then some of us were sent up to sit in the jury box and explain how many friends and relations we had in the criminal justice system. More people were excused at this point, including me, so my dramatic story ends here.
You may not believe this, but New Yorkers are pretty tolerant and civic-minded. They'll show up, sit quietly, and pay attention when a judge is talking. They'll follow orders and they're nice to one another. I've seen them squashed into subway cars, stoically, silently taking it when a guy decided to play his enormous boombox and yell that he's selling CDs — just swaying back and forth with the motion of the car, waiting for the next stop and the end of the noise. Today I saw them mildly, quietly waiting to be called, rolling their eyes at each other every once in a while when the jury clerk was scolding people for one thing or another — but otherwise being very patient.
The jury clerk got particularly noisy when people apparently detached the public computers from their power sources so that they could plug in their own devices. “These computers are really, really old,” she said. “So whenever you do that, we have to call in the network guy so he can fiddle around with the computers and get them started up again. That's completely annoying. So don't touch anything except the keyboards.” She said this in an increasingly loud voice, hands on her hips, glaring at us.
This must happen every day. I bet she wishes computers had never been invented. The people around me just kept reading their magazines and napping.