Our Justice System

I had a brush with it today. NO! I didn’t do anything wrong, I just had jury duty. Sorta. Well, almost.

I got my summons, looked to see if there was any way to get out of it without telling a lie, and decided I couldn’t.

Somehow I’ve managed to go my whole life without having to do it, and I think my conscience got the better of me. You know, civic duty and all that crap. Don’t get offended. I KNOW it is, but I don’t have to like it.

In my mind, it’s kinda like unfettered capitalism. It’s the best system there is, but it has problems, and I think we could do a better job of it. I just don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be a defendant, a witness, a victim, a juror, or even a plaintiff. I just want to stay clear of the whole thing.

For starters, I am a mediator – NOT a decider. I am a terrible judge of character and I don’t like being put in the position of having to determine who is telling the truth and who is lying. I don’t like having to figure out if the defense has been able to keep pertinent facts from coming out. I don’t like having to guess if the prosecution made a premature decision on who the bad guy was without looking into all possible suspects. I’m not good at reading between the lines to figure out if a witness has an ax to grind, or just completely blew the line-up. I never know if I have all the puzzle pieces, or if I’m trying to make pieces fit, that really don’t. The bottom line is I don’t want to be responsible for making a mistake that will alter the course of someone’s life.

And it isn’t about justice anymore. It’s about clearing cases for the prosecution, and “winning” for the defense. It’s become some kind of weird game. Even when the “state” learns that a horrible mistake has been made and an innocent person has years of their lives stolen from them, they don’t want to admit an error was made. We’ve seen it happen over and over and over. Somehow we gotten away from what I always THOUGHT was the point, and that was discovering the truth. The OTHER bottom line is, I probably watch too much cop stuff on tv!

ANYWAY. So, I got there early, signed in, and sat and sat and sat, got released for a 2 hour lunch, then came back and sat and sat and sat, and finally got cleared to go home after 8 hours. Fortunately it counts as having served, so it’ll be awhile before I have to do a repeat performance. Hopefully by then I’ll be old enough to not have to do it anymore. Heeheehee! And as boring and uncomfortable as it was to just sit around, it was a heck of a lot better than the stress of actually being on a jury would have been, so I’m going to call it a win.

Aside from how good it felt to get released, the best part of the day was getting to have lunch with my daughter, who works downtown, not too far from the courthouse.

And….my Alaska photo of the day…

Have a GREAT day!