My Civic Duty

Like most Americans who were stupid enough to register to vote, it came to pass that I got picked for jury duty. Initially, I got called up by El Paso county, but since I'm currently living, well, not there, I told them they could go fly a kite up their butts, or something like that. Instead of merely lying down and taking my unprovoked verbal abuse like they should have, they just told their Boulder counterparts that I'm living here now, and as a result, I got a similar summons to appear at the Boulder County Justice Center about a week later.

I showed up bright and early at the crack of 8 a.m., and I was herded into a room with approximately one million other people. It smelled like a musty old library in desperate need of a few spritzes from a bottle of Febreze. I was given a questionnaire that included a brief summary of the case for which I'd been selected. It asked me how I felt about the American legal system, and I responded that I felt it was "slightly less meritocratic than that of Escobar-era Colombia" and that I'd "rather fellate a curling iron than spend another minute in this stank-ass hell hole." It then asked me if I could think of any reason why I wouldn't be able to serve as an objective and impartial member of the jury. I saw the question not as an attempt to weed out potentially biased jurors, but rather as a personal challenge to see how frank I could be about the whole experience without getting into trouble. This, I swear on all that is holy and sugar-free, was my answer: "Honestly, I simply don't care."

My fellow potential jurors and I were then led into an actual, real-life courtroom (just like in the movies!), where we each proceeded to whisper to ourselves, "I want the truth! You can't handle the truth!" and "This whole courtroom is out of order!" Or maybe that was just me. The judge (oh, that reminds me: Did you know that women can be judges now? Next thing you know, they'll have the right to own property!) explained to us that since the trial was for first degree murder, she expected it to last about two weeks. Because there were so many of us, they'd split us up into groups of ten to fifteen, call each group in one at a time, and then interview us to determine our eligibility to jur (I presume that’s the verb form).

I'm fairly confident in my assumption that I was the only person there with a job, and was therefore the only one who absolutely had to ensure that I would not be selected to serve on the jury. However, I also have a crippling allergy to getting prison raped, so I needed to make sure I wouldn't perjure myself. I figured that since I'd been taught my whole life that honesty is the best policy, it might not hurt to try it in front of a judge, a bunch of lawyers, and an accused murderer (yes, he was sitting right there, entirely unshackled, across the table from my own terrified self). The only thing the judge asked me about was my statement that I simply don't care, and I told her that I'm more concerned about working during the holidays than I am about some silly murder trial. That's when the defendant laughed. That's right: I made a man who was most likely worrying about spending the rest of his life in prison laugh. It was a good day.

I was immediately excused from the jury, and since it was nearing the end of the business day, none of the rest of the trials were still in need of jurors, so I was told by the clerk that I'd just officially fulfilled my civic duty. I didn't say anything, as I was afraid I would accidentally say the only response that I could think of: "I guess this is what I get for voting."

If I'm being honest, the part that really annoyed me the most wasn't the possibility that I could have lost two weeks of my life pretending to care about the fate of some guy who totally shot some other guy over an ideological dispute about whether or not the former had the right to rob the latter at gunpoint. No, what annoyed me most of all was the fact that I had to get up at six o'clock in the damn morning on my day off.