A Week of Jury Duty

After waiting nearly six years since my 18th birthday, I finally received my first jury summons in late September. After deferring for a week, I followed the instructions and made my way to DC Superior Court at 8 AM last Monday. After the orientation video (complete with cheesy music and bad acting) I was among the first groups of 50 called to sit for selection.

After four hours of jury selection, I was chosen to sit on the jury of a case in which the defendant was charged with 15 felony counts. We had three days of testimony filled with police, forensics experts, and several witnesses who had all borne the defendant’s children but were unsure as to his real last name. There were points in the trial, especially when some of these witnesses started talking about their open and often interconnected relationships (read as ménage à trois), when I thought someone in the audience would grab a banjo off the wall and the courtroom would bust into an impromptu square dance.

I won’t go further into the details here (feel free to ask me offline) so as not to associate my identity with the case, I wouldn’t want anyone looking me up several years down the road. Suffice it to say that after three days of deliberations, we found him guilty on most of the charges. As the foreman, my fellow jurors reassured me that if they saw me on the news, they would know I had taken one for the team. They are all a great group of people representing a diverse range of backgrounds. It would have been nice to stay in touch with a few of them, but not being sure of the protocol there, nobody exchanged any contact information.

I’ve been told that as long as I remain a Washington DC resident, I will receive a jury duty summons every two years like clockwork. I’ll go ahead and mark my calendar and see if they’re right!