Day one of my first ever stint at jury duty was something of a non-event. I know that’s not much of a hook. But it’s the truth. The one bit of advice I got from friends was this: “bring a book.” And that is sound advice.
I got tapped for circuit court, which is in downtown Charleston. As I’m not downtown very often, it was a refreshing change of pace. I drove in early, parked in the designated garage, and walked several blocks to the courthouse itself. Being downtown is much more like being in a real city than my usual haunts. It has that street-level energy that you don’t get shuttling back and forth from the burbs to the office parking lot, all in the air-conditioned comfort of an automobile. The city deserves points for clear signage. A sandwich board clearly indicated the entry to the parking garage: “All jurors park here.” As I headed down Meeting Street toward Broad Street, where the court is located, an officer of the court was standing on the sidewalk, pointing the shortcut to the court building.
And, while I’m singing the praises of the establishment, I should note that everyone I encountered in the courthouse was impeccably polite. I started to wonder if they were all stage actors in some hidden-camera documentary about southern charm and hospitality. But it seemed genuine, or at least deeply ingrained (which, I suppose, comes to much the same thing). As civility is often missing from public life, I admit it was refreshing. I found myself ratcheting up my own manners. It was much more like a trip to visit some slightly stuffy, well-to-do uncle (not that I have one) than a trip to the DMV.
We were ushered into a large room of tightly spaced but comfortable chairs. A column of round tables was on the left of the room, with lawyers sitting around them looking over paperwork or browsing through the morning news. As a large clock in the front of the room approached nine o’clock, an assistant called us to order and a man who bore a striking resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld took to the podium. He explained that we’d be doing a roll-call in which we would each stand, in turn, and state our name, age, occupation, and the occupation of our spouse (if we had one). As there were at least 250 potential jurors in the room, this took quite a bit of time. As each juror took his or her turn, the lawyers eyed us closely and scribbled notes on their own copies of the roll.
After roll call, the judge himself, decked out in robes, took to the pulpit. He was a tall, handsome man in his fifties with a deep voice who spoke with an old Charleston accent, something quite rare these days. He made some preliminary remarks about the importance of jury duty and of the justice system in general, all the while thanking us profusely for our service. The case he was to preside over involved a man and his wife suing a local television news station for defamation. One by one, the judge ran through a list of increasingly broad questions, asking anyone who fit the criteria to stand and explain himself and then asking each if such an association would stand in the way of making a fair decision on the matters at hand. Some questions were clearly designed to parse the crowd’s political affiliations. I owned up to having previously worked at a newspaper and to regularly getting my news from CNN.
There were at least three lawyers in the jury pool, which slowed things down a bit, as all of them were personal and professional acquaintances of all the lawyers on both sides of the case and, as it turned out, with practically everyone else in Charleston. In keeping with their own code of ethics, they were each duty bound to admit each of these potential conflicts of interest before dismissing them as irrelevant.
This went on until 1:30 PM, when we finally broke for an hour and a half for lunch. On the advice of one of the bailiffs, I walked a few blocks down Broad Street to a sandwich shop called Brent’s On Broad, which turned out to be excellent and, for downtown, surprisingly reasonable. On the walk back, I stopped by a lovely park complete with ample shade trees, a central obelisk, and a bust of one Henry Timrod, a Confederate poet whom I had never heard of previously.
When I made it back to the big room, Donald Rumsfled took the stage again and called out the names of thirty or so of us, myself included, to go upstairs to yet another court. Here we were ushered into the audience box of the courtroom itself, where we sat on pews–further underscoring the churchy feel of the place. A much younger judge, in his mid thirties, I would guess, asked us some similar (dis)qualifying questions, though the list was much shorter and more perfunctory. This was a criminal case involving several charges related to a shooting in North Charleston. The accused, a small, young, black woman in her early twenties, was in the court, along with her counsel. It was striking to be in the same room with a woman, noticeably pregnant, accused of such a grievous crime. A few jurors were excused because they or members of their family had been victims of violent crimes.
Members of the pool were pulled up randomly to stand in front of the lawyers, who would then either accept them or strike them, without stating a reason. The twelve jurors and three alternates were selected in fairly short order and the rest of us were dismissed for the day, told to call the information line after six o’clock to see if our services would be needed the following day.
As I wandered down the stairs and the long hallway out of the court building, feeling a little let down yet also relieved at not having been selected, and pondering the weighty machine that is our criminal justice system, I noted a huge inscription on the stone walls of the courthouse: “Where law ends, tyranny begins.” I though it an entirely fitting slogan, especially in these trying times.