sick (part II)
Spelling and basic reasoning skills are escaping me. For the past week I’ve had somewhat of a head cold, and life has been a little blurry. I’ve spent the last three of these quasi-sick days in jury duty, where my inability to focus has not much affected my ability to sit around, sneak out to make phone calls, and wander beautiful Tribeca.
Jury duty in New York City is not as advanced as the rest of the nation (where aparently you can just phone in), but they do try to take care of you, or at least encourage you to not hate being there. They didn’t feed us (people keep asking me that) but they did give us generous lunch breaks and were nice about scheduling.
I sat on the panel for two cases. The first was a three day personal injury trial, and all the jurors on the panel thought they could be fair and leave personal biases aside. The second case involved a twelve day trial for medical malpractice, and suddenly most of the jurors were volunteering that they would not be able to get over their very strong feelings about issues in the case in order to arrive at a fair verdict. As someone who measures response rates for a living, I was still surprised at the psychological impact of knowing the duration of the trial.
Jury duty has been pretty sweet. I’ve enjoyed fulfilling my civic duty by showing up and then basically doing whatever I wanted. Learing more about the judicial process has of course been rewarding. But probably my favorite thing has been arriving at a New York Court House and finally being on the good side of the law.
