Commenting on the O.J. Simpson trial the other night, Jay Leno pointed out that members of the jury will be paid $5 a day and said that this "kind of shows you where the values are in this country. We pay people who work at McDonald's more money than people who make life-and-death decisions."
That remart struck a chord with me because I had that very day been the recipient of a check for $6 for having spent one long and dreary day as a prospective juror in Tarrant County, Texas.I escaped actual jury service when the woman seated immediately to my right became the 12th and final juror selected to decide the fate of the defendant.
Considering that I had arrived at the Criminal Justice Center at 7:30 a.m. and wasn't released until 5:20 p.m., the $6 remuneration works out to a little less than 71 cents an hour.
Although I had previously served on three juries, I encountered a few surprises this time out.
For one thing, the county deserves praise for streamlining the front end of the process. It used to be that people could spend three days lounging around the central jury room and never move. These days, under a "one day, one trial" rule, if people aren't selected for a jury the first day, they're dismissed.
The questioning of prospective jurors by the prosecutor and the defendant's attorney had its interesting moments, too, even though both - being lawyers - enjoyed the sound of their voices far more than we did.
Both tended to overexplain almost everything, but maybe that's not as bad as it seemed at the time to those of us squirming uncomfortably in the incredibly rigid wooden pews.
A few of the prospective jurors had some sharp questions for the attorneys, too, which in my opinion speaks well for the system. Justice would be ill-served by having 42 zombies to choose from.
I didn't perceive, among my fellow panelists, any particular anxiety to serve on the jury, which is understandable. Carried out properly, jury duty can be exhausting, both physically and emotionally. And there's always the possiblitiy, remote though it may be, that you'll wind up on a case requiring the sequestering of the jury, which brings us back to O.J. Simpson - and to Chicago Tribune cloumnist Bob Greene.
Greene, writing about the Simpson case, said that sequestering's not so bad. In fact, he wrote, "it provides precisely what a significant portion of the population is looking for" - safety. After all, he continued, the jurors "will be housed in a comfortable hotel, guarded by law-enforcement officials from the vagaries of the dastardly world."
Best of all, they'll be spared the endless news accounts of the Simpson case.