Good lord y’all…finally, FINALLY…we came to a verdict today in the case. It was touch and go. I honestly wasn’t sure we were going to get there, but we did.
The case was about a guy that fell over a wheel stop, which is one of those cement block-things that your tires bump up against at the front of a parking stall. The fall ended up being pretty serious, and he had to have surgery because of it. I prefer not to say how specifically I voted, but we as a group agreed that there was negligence on the part of the store, and of the man who fell himself, and much of the haggling we had to do inside the jury room was apportioning what we felt was the proper percentage of responsbility.
Jury duty is no joke – I can tell you now after serving that it is clearly an incredibly important part of our society, the ability to have a group of normal, everyday people just like you, sitting in that box listening to the facts and the arguments of a case, and then sitting in a room together deciding what is just and what is fair according to the law. It was a very emotional, very intense place to be, and everyone in that room felt an enormous responsibility to do the right thing and to listen to what everyone else thought was the right thing.
That last bit, about needing to listen to each other, really stood out to me. The nature of a jury, at least one that’s able to deliver an actual verdict (which definitely doesn’t happen all the time), is that it forced us in that room to compromise. See, in a civil trial, every verdict decision has to be reached by a vote of at least 9-3. That means if we were 7-5 or 8-4, clear majorities…we could not move forward. We HAD to work together. We HAD to find the consensus that was required of us. It simultaneously gives each person so much power, and also takes it away at the same time; by that I mean, if you’re the 4th person in an 8-4 split, you really dictate so much of the negotiations because the group is focused on trying to please you and get you to change your vote. On the other hand, if you’re part the MAJORITY at that point, you feel like you have so little power because you have to bend and compromise to that other person if you want to reach a verdict.
At the end of the day, I remain very, very impressed by the system, to be honest. What it REALLY does is put the onus on the plaintiff or defense to make a compelling, iron-clad, undeniable case. That’s the only way you get a jury to agree 9-3 (at least) on something. The attorneys in this case didn’t do a stellar job at that, to be honest, but apparently they did enough because we did reach our verdict. The guy who fell will get paid; perhaps not as much as he wanted, but he will, and I think we all walked out of that trial thinking that, at the very least, we were fair in how we took the information of the case as it was presented to us and turned that into a judgement on who was responsible.
I am exhausted. Absolutely exhausted. The Ho had a shoot today, and she too is exhausted. I took a nap when I got home, and then she got home and we went out to dinner at Pitfire Pizza…my all-time favorite pizza, I think.
Tomorrow is a day off (and the next three days after that…I attack Starstuff 2 on Monday). I get to see Josh and talk Trek with him. We’re going to have breakfast and watch the animated series in our jammie-jams. It’s going to be dope.
Night!
Philip Hodas is the artist for tonight – his series of pop-culture “relics” is absolutely amazing.