Jury Duty Part I: Jury Selection

Jury selection falls upon you out of the blue, in a non poetic white envelope dropped in the mail. Potential jurors are required to fill a short questionnaire, answering some basic personal questions, then mail it back before a certain date. If chosen, after a week or two the potential juror will receive a summons. This will be a four part white paper (A,B,C,D) with colored stripes. Different colors indicate different types of summons, or courts. The summons usually calls for a date in the near future, four or five weeks away.

In Brooklyn, chances are you will be asked to show up at the Supreme Court building on Jay Street, 2nd Floor. The 2nd floor hosts a very large waiting room with comfortable seating and TV screens, as well as a lounge with snack and drink machines and a small computer room with internet access.

For the first half hour of the morning, you will be required to watch a half-hour long video presentation on the inner works of Jury Duty. As latecomers shuffle in, a clerk seated at the front with a microphone will ask you to take out your summons, and will explain what each of the four parts are for. Eventually, he will retrieve two parts from all potential jurors seated there. Do not be as foolish as I was: bring newspapers, books, and whatever else might relieve your boredom.

This being New York, the clerk might ask immigrants with very limited or no knowledge of English to step aside to an office, and probably be dismissed. He will also ask those who are not feeling well or have another valid excuse to go see another clerk in a side office and see if they can be excused.

The room is packed with people at this point, and after an hour or less clerks begin to call names through the microphone, then gather the people called and shepherd them to a court room in the building.

I was finally called at 11:00 AM and, with another nineteen people, guided towards another Supreme Court building. We entered through a side entrance and were escorted to the 7th floor. The courtroom was small, and we sat on the visitor's benches, filling out detailed questionnaires.

The court clerk introduces himself and the lawyers on the case, then put the potential jurors' name cards into a rotating, old style raffle contraption and calls out eight to ten names to be seated on the Juror's podium.
The prosecuting lawyer then questions each potential juror, trying to determine whether each one of them could judge fairly. People who have had an experience too close to the actual case and feel they will not be able to separate their personal experience have a chance of being dismissed.

The questioning goes on for a few hours. After a 75 minute lunch break, the defending lawyer further questioned the jurors. Finally, the lawyers adjourned to a nearby room and selected their jury. They now needed two alternates, jurors who would sit through the entire trial but not serve unless needed to substitute an excused juror. 6 people were selected from the remaining attendees, and the questioning began again.

At this point, the selected jurors were silently led out of the room and shown their cozy jury room, with table and comfortable seating, and told when to show up the next day. Jurors are to stay in that room whenever they are not sitting in the courtroom, including during lunch hour.

What happened next? Stay tuned for Jury Duty II.