I have always been proud to call myself an American citizen. First it was the childish glee of walking straight through customs on the many, many times we came here on vacation, like all middle class Venezuelans. Then it was the understanding of American culture, the slight aura of worldiness that a blue passport gave. And finally, the ease with which I could move here in the middle of a migratory crisis, the largest one in South American history and only comparable to the Syrian refugee exodus because of the civil war there. I always had a bit of survivor’s guilt, though, especially knowing how so many Venezuelans have suffered to get out. I vowed I would never take my luck for granted and would try and do everything correctly to be a good citizen.
So I am here, an hour away from home, in the small town of Bartow, Florida… on jury duty.
Think of every time you’ve seen someone on jury duty in any movie or TV show you’ve ever seen. You don’t have to look far in time: Clint Eastwood’s new film, Juror #2, is about a man (Nicholas Hoult) on jury duty. But you probably have seen one of two things: how people try to get out of jury duty (think Penny’s sexy black dress which she proudly says she used for such a purpose on The Big Bang Theory), or the absolute stress that is sitting on an actual jury, be it either a fictional one like in Sidney Lumet’s uber classic Twelve Angry Men, or the insanity that was the OJ Simpson trial that Ryan Murphy brought to amazing life on American Crime Story: The People Vs OJ Simpson.
If we are to believe the media, being a juror is, at the very least, one of the most excruciatingly boring duties an American citizen can perform. And having been in meetings that seem unnecessary (“This could’ve been an email” is so, so true in too many occasions) and, embarrassingly so, having an uncanny inability to stay awake for long periods of time in silent situations, I can see why. Imagine a smaller case of, say, burglary, but where the defense lawyer decides to bring in a series of witnesses that swear that man is a Godsend and would NEVAH.
But on the other, it’s something that is close to sacred to the American justice system. Trial by jury goes back to the ancients Greeks, Saxons, and even the early Germanic tribes had groups of men hear cases and dispense justice. We should all be grateful that we stopped following the Greek model, where up to 500 men stood in a jury; let’s see Henry Fonda persuade 499 angry men!
The modern trial by jury started after the Norman Conquest of 1066 in medieval England and Normandy, especially during the reign of King Henry III. But what truly inspired the modern American trial-by-jury system was the Magna Carta of 1215, the charter of rights signed by King John, which states in Chapter 39:
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions…except by the lawful judgment of his equals…
President John Adams himself said that a trial by jury, as well as representative government, served as “the heart and lungs of liberty”. “Without them we have no other fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeces like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hounds,” he said.
(You can read more in this article on History.com.)
So yeah, jury duty, boring as all hell as it may be, is important work. Imperfect, of course, as the recent resurrection of the Menendez brothers’ trial shows, but still, it seems better than the Venezuelan one, where you’re prisoner of the whim of a single judge and you pray to every God you might know of that they’re one of two honest judges left in the country, because remember what happened to the last judge who dared go against the government and…
But I digress. You would like to read how was my day as a juror, I’m sure. Spoiler alert: you’ll be disappointed.
I got to the Bartow courthouse at 8:01 am, on a 60 degree blue sky weather Thursday. I’m always a little jittery when I get to a new experience, especially one that is as serious as being a juror, or so I think. I walk in, and a lady tells me if I’m here for jury duty I should take those elevators, that floor, and make a left. Some ten of us take the same elevators with the summons paper and get to the corresponding floor, and are filed into what looked like a converted movie theater with a podium. I was expecting a lot of people, but when I saw no less than a hundred faces, I was a little taken aback. Depending on what you expected, that was either good (I got to go home early) or bad (you’ve wasted your time). In either case, as one of the clerks working there told us, it was a waiting game.
These ladies, by the way, had sympathy for us. “Everyone, if you want to have some coffee, there’s freshly brewed coffee over here on the right”, one with a chirpy little voice told us. “We’re just waiting for a few calls, and then we will call the name on the badge we gave you. That means you will either go to the courtroom, or you will be dismissed and sent home, yay!”
This of course made most of us chuckle, because no matter how interesting this whole process can be, nobody actually wants to be here on, as was my case, their day off. And Quirky Lady knew that, because she added, “Or you could go up to the courtroom, and then you’re sent home”, adding crossed fingers and a funny grin to this.
I had to chime in. “You must really love your job”, I quipped. More chuckles, and she looked at me and laughed as she exited the room.
About ten minutes after that, coffee almost gone (free coffee? Of course I got up and got some), another lady, I’ll call her Freckles, walked in. “If you see your badge and there is a Judge [name I have forgotten], please follow me to the back”, she said. Some twenty or so people got up and followed her to the courtroom. Ok, here we go, I thought.
Fifteen minutes later, Freckles came in, said the same thing with a different judge name, and another twenty or so people followed her. That left one last group that included yours truly. This lady came in and said that, since there was more room, we were free to walk around the seccond floor. I immediately got up and went to the waiting room next door. There were books, magazines, two vending machines, and actual tables, where someone had a Stitch jigsaw puzzle that was maybe one-quarter finished. I picked a table and started writing this post.
You probably guessed what would happen, but here we go: About twenty minutes in, Freckles calls us in with “an announcement”. We file in to the first room, where we are informed that the defendant in the case we were to sit in failed to attend. Oh snap, they in trouble, I thought. “Therefore, your services are no longer required”. Some people whooped, most laughed, others remained unperturbed. Me, I had this mixture of being let down and being free. I decided to find the cafeteria and finish this before going home.
I won’t lie, I was kind of looking forward to try and put my note-taking skills to the test. The last time I had done that in a serious matter was during a press conference by Ron DeSantis himself, and then a demostration of a new training system with the Orange County sherriff’s office. In short, I wanted to feel like I was doing something that mattered outside my little circle.
But that’s the trap of depression: it makes you want to think you’re NOT doing something that mattered. One juror can be the difference between a man losing his life or a mother reunited with her children, orwhatever small justice we can dispense. In the same matter, maybe me making lunch with my wife is all she needs to be able to go to work tomorow in a better mood, doing a better job. Or it means I’m in a better mood.
In the end, it matters. Maybe not in the grand scheme of things (careful with that butterfly, though…) but it does. Today I didn’t get to perform my duty, but as long as I’m in this country, there’s always tomorrow.
There’s always tomorrow.
My Mind in Letters 