I got it. Last monday, I reported and was picked to serve in the first Houston trial since the floods. There was only a 15% chance that I be picked (not counting people who obviously lied to get out of jury duty) and I got it. Just too damned good-looking, I guess. It was an experience. I'm not sure whether or not to recommend it. It was good in some ways and sickening in others. The case was a trucking company that had 4 employees and had contracts with a number of independent owner-operators to haul sand and gravel for their one customer. One of their employees, their dispatcher, decided to quit and start his own trucking company. In doing so, he took most of the fleet with him (allegedly without warning) and crippled the company. So they sued him for breach of fiduciary duty. We decided against them, and bankrupted the original company. The good thing about the experience (other than not coming into the office) was the unique phenomenon of sitting down with 11 strangers and solving a problem of significance. When you sit and listen to all the testimony and then the Charge of the Court, you've got your opinions on how to decide. It seems like the only logical way to see it. Then, you sit down with these 11 people and find out that they didn't see it at all the way you did. And then you talk and talk and talk and argue until you can finally get some sort of resolution together. And, as you are talking, everyone knows each person has 1 vote and that you'll need their cooperation and that everyone is trully equal. Just because someone is an idiot or a racist or a sexist or whatever doesn't mean you don't need him to agree with you. The sickening thing is this: over 5 questions, we need unanimity of 10 of the 12 jurors. After about 8 hours of talking, we were reduced to changing one woman's answer on question 2 or my answer on question 3. Eventually, they convinced me to change my answer on #3 by arguing that contracts between owner-operators and the new company weren't signed until after the dispatcher quit (believe me, you don't want me to explain the whole case). So we decided against the plaintiff, who will now be bankrupt. After the case, I was talking with the plaintiff's lawyers who told me that, in fact, the contracts were signed before he quit. Had that been clear, they still wouldn't have won, but the jury would have been hung. Instead, because of this little ommission, the company is dead. I don't feel guilty because I know I held up my end. But I don't feel justice was served. ------------------ RealGM Gafford Art Artisan Cakes
ahhh... American justice, aint' it grand? I hated my experience on jury duty... capital murder that ended up in a hung jury. What a waste of a week! The good thing is we weren't sequestered. rH ------------------ Updated: The Psychedelic Groove House of Rockets Basketball Love! join the club! Rockets Psychedelic Groove House Club on Yahoo! Stop annoying X10 ads! This link will set a cookie on your system that will disable X10 ads for one year!
I had jury duty in October/November of last year. It was a capitol murder case that was on the news quite a bit. A latino male shot and killed a woman in a convenience store. We were the first group called and they had us go to the cafeteria to fill out a questionaire. You could tell it was going to be a murder case because it was all questions about your stance on the death penalty and if there would be something keeping you from being sequestered for 2-6 weeks. Well, long story short I didn't get picked. They had already brought in 6 groups in the previous weeks and already had 11 jurors. They just needed 1 juror and some alternates. Then I went to my car and found my battery dead because I left the lights on. The guy ended up being conviced of capitol murder and senteced to death.
