Jury Duty

I was summoned for the jury duty last week, spent last 5 days in court, was waiting until Thursday, March 26th, to be selected, and was chosen as a juror to participate in a trial in a State Supreme Court.

We (the jurors) formed a nice group of people,  we had plenty of time to talk and to get to know each other, while waiting for the lawyers and our honorable judge to do their work, and also during our lunch breaks. 

The New Jersey court provided us with drinks twice a day, they were ordering from the nearby courthouse restaurant, and we had a wide choice of soda, juices, coffee and tea. Every day I was trying to get a grapefruit juice and had no luck, it was always substituted by orange or pineapple juice. They should probably delete it from the menu...

By the way, our judge looked very much like Sandra Bullock, and the defense attorney looked like  Jim Parsons, who plays Dr. Sheldon Cooper on the CBS television series The Big Bang Theory, only 20 years older. 

The court worked very similar to whatever we see on the Law and Order, only everything was way too long and sometimes boring, it is a hard job to listen to the witnesses, especially when expert witnesses were digging deep into their professional matter.

One day we had observers - boy scouts who wanted to learn about the court work during their spring break, and one kid was an exactly Harry Potter, in those round glasses. No need to say that one of the boys fell asleep during a long testimony, which was not good because he made all of us sleepy...

At the end it was kind of strange that we had to go back to our everyday lives and possibly never meet afterward. I will keep in touch with several people, I guess. Facebook is a nice communication tool, after all...