Jury Duty

Today I fulfilled my civic duty and reported for jury duty. When I told people I had jury duty this week, their reactions were of mostly grumbling and stories of how horrible it would be. I didn't seem to see it that way though! I was secretly hoping to get picked for a trial just to be able to experience the whole "Law & Order" hype.

I reported to the Johnson County Courthouse at 9am and then 45 of us were wisked away to a court room. There they randomly selected 24 people to be questioned for potential jurors and let everyone else leave. I was one of the 24 selected and was so excited...you would think I had won a prize or something as excited as I was?! The judge for the case came in and told us that the trial would be starting today, it would probably not last longer than a day, it would be a DUI case and what would be expected from us jurors. Then the attorney's for the case came in and asked us all kinds of questions about life experiences - mainly pertaining to alcohol. They asked me specifically if I had ever been at a function and witnessed someone who had drank too much alcohol and were unable to drive home and how did I come to the conclusion that they were unable to drive. I thought for sure my answer would be sending me on my way but surprisingly, I was one of the 12 jurors selected for the case.

Once they picked the jury, they started with opening arguments and then we broke for lunch. When we returned the trial got back underway. We heard testimony from the police officer who arrested the defendent (who was pleading not guilty), from the defendents' girlfriend and from the defendent himself as well as watched the 35 min police video from the arrest. It was about 5pm when we went back to deliberate whether the guy was guilty or not guilty of being too impaired to drive a vehicle without a reasonable doubt based on the evidence and testimony heard.

There were 4 of us who said not guilty and 8 that said guilty so we went back and watched the video again to see if anyone would change their mind. It is now 6pm and we can't come to a mutual decision so we told the judge, he declared it a hung jury and the guy will retry the case at another time.

After the trial was over, the judge & the attorney's came back to our room where they asked us how we went about making our decision & why we thought he was either guilty or not. We later found out from the judge that this is the guys' 3rd DUI arrest and he has been in the system many times for numerous things other than his DUI. At this moment I became a bit irritated. This guy purposely didn't blow a breathalizer because being his 3rd DUI, he knew they wouldn't be able to prove he was drunk by his BA level & use it in court against him so he obviously knows how to work the system and the attorney knew we wouldn't be able to all agree on a verdict based on the evidence so it would have to be re-tried later. So basically I just wasted my entire day on a BS trial. Oh well...the experience was worth something so I guess it wasn't a total waste of a day.