~…end Wordless
[scroll below jury duty update for commenting]
My jury duty is over for the year. Or at least until I get another summons in the mail. We were instructed Monday to be at the central courtroom at 8 a.m. Then, the selection of potential jurors for many-a-trials were selected. I was one of 60 selected for jury “I” –yes, there were that many trials scheduled for this week, and more even after our group was dismissed for the day. Just before we left on Monday, we all were given a sheet to have us call in on Monday evening at 5:00PM for further instructions…the recorded message was up for us until 8am on Tuesday morning. Okay, so I called in early hoping the recording would be up…it was…and Jury “I” was then instructed to reconvene at the central courtroom on Tuesday morning at 8:30 am. I got there at around 8:15am, and the sixty people were mostly all there by then, with a few little ‘stragglers’ coming in shortly after I arrived. Then, we sat…and sat. [I hate that part.] Altho, I did get some reading done. And watched juror #36 beside me play billiards on his cell phone while we continued to wait.
Finally the court clerk came in, took roll call. One didn’t show…oh, oh…around here, in this county in Texas if you don’t show up as instructed there is a stiff penalty — $1000.00 for the first and more if you continue to not show after other attempts of getting you as a juror.
Okay, then…the roll call complete. She calls up to the courtroom floor above us, on more floors; tells the judge we’re ready to be taken to his courtroom. We wait some more. She ends up leaving us to bide our time until a court deputy appears and escorts us all upstairs….
Around 9:30am, she re-enters the central courtroom where we were ‘held in captivity’…and tells us we have a twenty minute break. Oh boy……..I’m thinking “This is gonna be a long day for us all.”
Well, the twenty minute break turned into about an hour and a half!!! ‘Long about 11am, after a few of us went to the cafeteria and sat and drank iced bottled water, coffee, juice, etc…we were informed that the accused was in the midst of a plea bargain, yet the judge didn’t want us to leave until all legal documents were signed and notarized, etc. etc. etc. So, guess what, all 60 of us did some more waiting.
But the court clerk stayed with us…she sat by the phone wired up to the judge’s chambers…finally, the phone rang…she said “This is it people!” “It’s either release you, or take you up there for the rest of the day and more”. All’s quiet on the western front…[well, north in this case]…she hangs up the receiver, and turns around to us…”You’re free to go, ’til we need you again”……..boy howdy you should have seen the stampede through the main doors!!!
It was like letting all the pigeons out of the cage to fly free once again.
So, now my jury duty, my citizenship honor is over for this time. We never did find out what the trial was. And for that matter, I don’t think any of us cared.
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I don’t know if each county in Texas does their system this way for selecting jurors, but it’s really quite a ‘rinky-dink’ system here if you ask me. In Colorado, when I was summoned to be a potential juror, when we received the notice in the mail, —we were instructed to go to a certain courtroom in the courthouse, and we already knew what judge we had and soon found out what the trial was beforehand. A much less complicated way of handling it…saves a lot of paper work….saves a lot of time…saves a lot of all this extra labor/time for the unnecessary employees that are paid by our tax dollars!!! Really an odd way. I tellya, really odd. In Arizona while serving jury duty it was quite similar to Colorado’s…Texas? At least this county….did, I say odd before? It is.
NOW!! I can get back to bloggin’ and blog visiting. I must admit, I was ‘dying’ to get back and leave some comments to y’all who visited me in the last couple of days. Yay!! Free at last, free at last…thank god-almighty, I’m free at last. [to blog anyway]
