Law & Order: Jury Tedium
Greetings from floor 17 of Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago. It's a lovely room with sickly fluorescent lighting and an interior that belongs in a Smithsonian exhibit entitled "American Office Décor Of The Early 1960s." The only change in this room has seen since the day Kennedy was shot is people's clothing.
As a virgin (potential) juror and a huge fan of Law & Order (I interviewed Kathryn Erbe the other day), I have to admit I'm pretty fascinated by the whole process, though I know it will bear absolutely no resemblance to the show. For one thing, I'm stuck in civil court. Instead of deciding whether a reality-show producer is guilty of negligent homicide for making a cast member face the man who molested her a child, I'll only get some crap like whether a grocery store is responsible for a woman slipping on its floor. Was the "WET FLOOR" sign really clear enough? Did its man-slipping icon sufficiently convey the potential danger?
For government class in high school my junior year, we went to the Harris County courthouse (which sends more criminals to death row than any other county–ah, Texas) to watch our judicial system in action. As students, we were just glad to be out of the classroom and turned loose on downtown Houston on a weekday. I wandered from court to court–family, criminal, civil–with my similarly smart-alecky friends, snickering to ourselves, and undoubtedly annoying court personnel. (Some of our classmates were not only expelled from one courtroom for being disruptive, but also thrown into a holding cell.)
The courtroom of the notorious Ted Poe came closest to what I see now on Law & Order. My friends and I nicknamed him "the Terminator" for is swift, brutal, and usually outspoken delivery of judicial vengeance. There was a guy who was in for like his fifth DWI or something, and Poe reamed him, yelling, "You're a menace to society! You've drawn the wrong judge for this!" The guy who was charged with licking a 7-year-old girl's anus was a dead man walking.
There will be nothing like that here today, though–just a lot of sitting around in a hideous building that looks like Mies Van der Rohe took a big dump in downtown Chicago. The courtrooms, from what I can tell, look pretty similar to this dreary waiting area. There's no chance of sitting in one of Law & Order's camera-friendly courtrooms, with their rich wood, giant windows, and perfect light.
Of course, I knew all of this before I arrived. I've learned my lessons over the years about that kind of thing.