Jury Duty

Went in for jury duty today fully prepared to do my duty for my fellow man. They had 3 or 4 cases to be heard, one of which was a civil suit which was expected to run possibly as long as 2 weeks. The others were projected to last 2-3 days. I got picked to go into the pool for the long one along with about 90 others.

10 or so begged off up front. In preliminary selection 20 were pulled to sit in the jury box and be questioned by first the judge, then the lawyers. As people were eliminated for one reason or another, all good to my observation, they were replaced by folks from the remaining 60. I got to replace someone in the first go-around which put me into the finals.

Eventually they got to 20 people with no up front disqualifications which included me, and the lawyers huddled to pick eight of us to sit the trial. After a good deal of passing paper back and forth, the lawyers agreed on the eight and the judge read the list. Surprisingly to me, I wasn't on it.

The case was a medical malpractice suit involving hematomas, CAT scans, and the interpretations of the scans. Having had a hematoma and a CAT scan and having been shown the scan and given the interpretation of same by my doctor probably disqualified me from listening to other peoples interpretations, at least to someones satisfaction, so back to work on tooling for a Vietnamese factory.