Jury Duty

I had been living in Denver for a little more than a year when I got my first jury summons. I had been summoned for a jury once before when I was in college, but I got out of that because it would have interfered with my classes. I didn't have any excuse for getting out this time.

I was told to report to the City and County Building on Monday, 04/02/90. I went to the jury waiting waiting room. The area looked like the inside of a 747. The chairs actually appeared to be arranged like airline seats. There were at least 150 people who had been summoned that day. I wanted to appear very undesirable as a jury candidate, so I wore a T-shirt and blue jeans with my bangs covering my eyes. I just figured no one would want me determining their fate.

For the presentation, they showed a video that was produced for another city which featured a well-known actor (who starred in the TV movie I had been an extra on.) They showed it to us as a test because they were thinking about producing a similar video for Denver featuring the same actor. Then they explained the process for jury selection. They would call out groups of numbers. (We were each assigned a number.) If our number was called, we were to go to the front of the room to be escorted to the courtroom that was going to need a jury. They called 24 numbers at a time. Mine was in the third group.

We went into the courtroom and sat down in the back. They explained that this was a civil case for wrongful death. A man died in an accident on a contruction site and his family was suing the man who owned the construction company. They would only need six people to sit on the jury. They called up 12 numbers to go sit in the jury box. Mine was one of those that got called. I thought that if I appeared to be rather knowlegable about construction, they wouldn't want me. After interviewing the jury candidates, the plaintiff and defense attorneys whittled us down to six. I was one of those six. I should have kept my mouth shut.

One of the other jurors said the next day that she talked to somebody from our group of 24. She was sent to another courtroom and was selected for that jury. So, our chances of escaping jury duty were pretty slim. So, if I was going to have to serve on a jury, I was better off on a civil case instead of a criminal case. I know I would have a hard time deciding to send someone to prison, but this was just about money.

Our jury consisted of three men and three women. Five of us were in our 20s. The other woman was in her 40s. One of the women complained later that she didn't think she could get called for jury duty because she hadn't registered to vote. However, we had found out that day that they also pulled jury candidates from DMV records. If you had a driver's license or state-issued ID card, you could get summoned.

One of the bad things about the jury experience for me was that I had to keep reminding myself that this was all real. My favorite TV show at the time was "LA Law." I had just been on that TV-movie playing an extra in courtroom scenes there at the City and County Building. I had to make myself think, "They are not making a movie. This man actually died. This woman lost her husband and these children lost their father. Our lunch is not going to be catered."

The lawsuit boiled down to this: The man who died was a foreman on the site. He fell through a hole on one floor because safety measures weren't in place around the hole. The family was suing the contractor for around $400,000. The plaintiffs called the contractor to the stand first. He just looked irritated the whole time. He was answering the questions asked of him, but he was just overall unpleasant. "Okay, guy. You're getting sued for almost a half-million here. You could at least not act like a villian on the stand."

Testimony continued for the next two days. The wife took the stand and broke out in tears. This caused her kids to break out in tears and we had to take recess after that. I have to admit that I didn't like being manipulated like that, but I was aware that was part of the system.

One of the things that came out in testimony was that the decedent had been ordered by the defendant to have the men begin work on the next level. However, OSHA regulations require that safety measures be put in place before any work can happen. This meant that he was knowingly going against OSHA regulations by having his men go to work on that level.

One the third day, we were subjected to testimony that had previously been videotaped. This meant that we were going to have to watch something on TV. This REALLY took me out of my reality shell. The person who testified was the guy who came up with the amount the man would have earned if he had continued to live. One interesting part of the testimony was that he had come up with one figure about a year earlier, but submitted a new figure on the testimony that was less than that amount by about $25,000.

We heard closing statements after that and were instructed to return the next day to deliberate. There was good news in this because we didn't get any money for the first three days of jury duty. We would get paid $50 every day after that. For what we went through in deliberations, we definitely deserved that $50.

After we all arrived, we were given jury instructions in the courtroom. The first step was to determine whether or not the contractor was acting as an agent on behalf of the developer. If he was not found to be an agent, we then had to determine the amount of damages and how much responsibility the defendant had in the incident.

We went into the deliberation room. They brought all the evidence: the police reports, the models, photos, etc. When we started the deliberations, we had to select a jury foreman. One of the men said that if no one else wanted to, he would volunteer. No one argued with that. We settled in and started working through the instructions. We got all caught up on the issue of whether the defendant was acting as an agent. If we found that he was an agent, he would be absolved of this issue and the family would have to sue the developer. We spent an hour discussing this issue. Keep in mind that the defendant's attorneys spent little time on this. It usually was brought up as an afterthought to the main testimony. One woman was in favor of determining that he was acting as an agent. The woman in her 40's then read the instructions a little more deeply and found that if the preponderance of the evidence did not support the claim that he was acting as an agent, then we had to say he was not an agent and continue to the damages and responsibility.

We could all agree that there wasn't enough evidence to support that. We moved on to the next part. The amount of damages. We spent a little time discussing the damages, but figured that none of us were able to do all the calculations and agreed to go with the amount that was provided by the expert witness.

At this point, it was lunch time. They actually took all six of us out to eat. Of course, we weren't allowed to discuss the case, but that didn't matter. I sat with the other two men and we just talked about guy stuff.

After we returned, we had to determine the percentage of responsibility. We speculated that the decedent was somewhat responsible for his own death, because he shouldn't have been up there with his crew without the safety equipment. However, we'd all been in situations in which we had to do what the boss told us, or we would be out of a job. We were about to come to a figure in which we would find the defendant 65% responsible and the decdedent 35% responsible. However, the woman who was in favor of saying the contractor was acting as an agent started yelling and crying. She buzzed the door to be let out. After she left, we were all rather stunned at what happened. Everything had been very civil between us for the previous three days. One of the court workers came in to instruct us not to deliberate until the juror had returned. Well, we weren't deliberating. We were just talking about her behind her back.

She came back in. She was a little more calm. The woman in her 40's sort of apologized. We continued and agreed to set the responsibility at 67%/33%. We signed all the paperwork attesting to the decision and submitted it to the court clerk. A few minutes later, court was called back into session. The judge read our verdict. When he got to the part in which he read off the percentages, I heard the plaintiff's attorney tell the wife, "We won." As we were leaving the jury box, the wife smiled at us and thanked us for our service. Some of us lingered and talked to the plaintiff's attorney about the case, because we had a lot of questions that we couldn't ask during the proceedings. This case had been bouncing back and forth between courts for four years. They finally decided to have the decision put to a jury. One of the other jurors asked if the defendant was going to appeal. "Oh, yeah. He's going to appeal."

I never bothered to keep track of what happened with the case after that and I never ran into any of the other jurors again during the time I lived in Denver.

I was glad I had that experience, but I've never served on another jury. Although I have been summoned twice since.

When I lived in San Diego, I was called in on a Thursday. They had a large jury pool room as well and there were probably 200 people there. They gave us the opportunity to be called back another day if that day was too inconvenient. About one-third decided to leave. They called out numbers for one group of jurors. We sat around waiting and then they sent us to lunch for an hour and a half. When we came back, we were told they wouldn't be calling any more juries that day and we would be free from jury duty for the next year. I got mad! Couldn't they have told us that before we went to lunch? I felt ripped off. I would have like to have at least had my number called so I wouldn't have considered that a waste of my time. I wondered if those people who had left would have been better off just sticking around. Now, they were all going to have to come back and risk getting selected again. I had the rest of the weekend off from work, so I went to visit my Mom and her husband in Phoenix.

A few years ago, I got called for jury duty in San Jose. However, I didn't have to report to some big jury room. I just had to check a website on-line every day for a week to see if my number was called up to report. It never was.

I was kind of disappointed. I'm actually hoping to get to serve on another jury again. Maybe one of these days.