How Jury Duty Alters View of Legal System

Allow me to suggest a powerful deterrent to would-be violators of the law in Orange County. Let them spend one day--just one--in the Jury Assembly Room and/or the jury box of the Superior Court of the County of Orange. The problem, as I see it, lies not at the bench, nor with the attorneys, but with the hazardous lottery that is known as “a jury of our peers.”

I arrived at Superior Courthouse, naive as a college freshman, eager to perform my jury service in the most thoughtful, unbiased manner possible. Armed with civic pride and a MacArthurian sense of duty, I approached the Jury Assembly Room, eager to serve a month’s jury duty with what I presumed would be perceptive citizens, also eager to hand up valid and measured decisions. Wrong.

Instead, one encounters a room filled with many prospective jurors who have arrived, knowing that they, too, will perhaps spend interminable hours waiting to be called. Do they bring books or magazines? Correspondence or projects to be completed? Crossword puzzles, even? No. Instead, multiples of the citizenry assembled are content to sit for hours, staring witlessly into the middle distance. There is clearly nobody home.

Then, if one is fortunate enough to be selected as a potential juror, it is still tough to make the final cut. Possession of an operable brain, all (well, most) of one’s faculties, quickly renders a candidate suspect. With keen insight, I soon discerned that these qualities, along with basic honesty, were deemed unnecessary in some jury boxes. I was excused from a claims case because I had failed to file suit for damages in a personal injury case, even though I was the guilty party. So much for integrity. But, ladies and gentlemen of the populace, who was left on the powerful 12? One old man who was deaf in one ear, an elderly lady with nary a tooth in her head, a Vietnamese-American who neither spoke nor understood much English and a Mexican-American whose pants were held up by a rope. Judgment by a jury of my peers? I quail at the thought.

JUDY PERRY

Laguna Beach