Dispatches from jury duty

I got called to jury duty.

Even as a professor of criminal justice who knows many of the police officers, attorneys and others working in the court.

Given my knowledge of the people involved in all the cases, I got deferred to civil court.

And I was on duty this week. All week.

Supposedly.

Turned out to be only a three day gig.

Here's what happened.

I walk into the court, along with about 100 other people also called as potential jurors. One by one people get called up, at random, to undergo questioning by both attorneys (voir dire). Eventualy, the jury was selected (12 people along with 1 alternate).

I didn't even get called. But I would not have made the case anyway, since I knew one of the parties involved (ironic, no?).

The case was this:

Woman 1 sleeps with Man 1 who is married to Woman 2. Woman 2 sues Woman 1 for two torts (wrongs or "crimes" in civil court). They include "alienation of affection" and "criminal conversation." (Yes, this is illegal: Woman 1 allegedly seduced Man 1 from his wife. And hey had sex. This is illegal in North Carolina.)

Since Man 1 was a local prosecutor and Woman 2 worked for a local defense attorney, the trial requires an out of town judge. This shuts down the courthouse for the whole week and no other cases can be resolved. On a docket with 6 or 7 cases for the week, this is only one they will get to!

The case was only supposed to take one day, but on day three, the judge was forced to let all the rest of the potential jurors go, since this case was still going on!

And the extent of my jury duty was to sit through part of the mess.

For this, I had to cancel four hours of classes!

Talk about inefficient and incompetent and broken and silly and stupid. And 100 citizens had to watch it. Wow.