Before this summer I had never served on a jury. I'm 44, I've been registered to vote since I was 18, and I had gotten the summons exactly twice before, both times for a week where I called in every night and was never told to report. So when the third one came in June, I figured it would be the same. It wasn't. I ended up spending the better part of two weeks in August in the county courthouse, and I came out of it thinking about it enough to write this page.

A word first about what's here and what isn't. Jurors are told, firmly, what they can and can't talk about, and I've kept to that. I'm not going to describe the people involved, the witnesses, the lawyers, what any juror said in the jury room, or how anybody voted. I'm not going to tell you the verdict. That's not what this page is for. What I want to describe is what it's like, from the summons to the last day, for the next person who opens that envelope and groans.

It came in a plain window envelope from the clerk of courts. Report on a Monday in August at 8:30 a.m. There was a questionnaire to fill out and mail back: occupation, whether I'd ever been a party to a lawsuit, whether I knew anyone in law enforcement, that kind of thing. My employer, by law in our state, has to let me go and can't fire me for it, though they don't have to pay me. Mine did pay me for the first week, which I'm grateful for. The county pays jurors $12 a day. I'll come back to that.

The envelope also said, in bold, that if I didn't show up they could hold me in contempt. I showed up.

About sixty of us in a big room in the basement with folding chairs, a coffee urn, and a television playing a videotape about the jury system. Around ten o'clock they called thirty names, mine included, and walked us upstairs to a courtroom. The judge explained that this was a civil case, a lawsuit arising out of a car accident, that it was expected to take about two weeks, and that the lawyers for both sides were now going to ask us questions to pick a jury. This part is called voir dire. The judge pronounced it "vwar deer" and so I will too.

The questions weren't what I expected. Nobody asked me to prove I was smart. They asked whether I'd ever been in a serious accident, whether I'd ever sued anyone or been sued, whether I had any strong feelings about lawsuits or about insurance companies, whether I could set aside anything I'd heard and decide only on what I saw in that room. Some people were excused for cause (one man's brother-in-law was one of the lawyers). Each side also got to excuse a few people without giving a reason. I kept expecting to be one of them. By 12:30 they had their jury and two alternates, and I was in seat number 7.

Before the first witness, and again nearly every time we left the room, the judge went over the rules. I wrote them down that first night from memory, and here they are as best I can reconstruct them, because I think they're the most important part of this page.

1. Don't talk about the case with anyone. Not your spouse, not your co-workers, not each other, until deliberations begin. The judge said this was the hardest rule and the most important, and he was right on both counts. My wife asked me "how was it" every night for two weeks and every night I said "fine."
2. Don't investigate on your own. Don't drive past the intersection. Don't look anything up. Don't read about it in the newspaper or watch it on the news if it's there. The only evidence is what comes through that door and is admitted in that room. If you want to know something the lawyers didn't ask, that's too bad; you decide on what you have.
3. Keep an open mind until the end. Don't decide anything after the first witness, or the first day, or the first week. The other side hasn't spoken yet.
4. The lawyers are not evidence. What they say in opening and closing is argument. The evidence is the witnesses and the exhibits.
5. In a civil case, the standard is "the preponderance of the evidence." That means more likely than not. It is not "beyond a reasonable doubt"; that's for criminal cases, and the judge said most of us would have that phrase in our heads from television and needed to put it away.
6. Follow the law as I give it to you, whether or not you agree with it. We would get the law in written instructions at the end. Our job was the facts.
7. If anyone tries to talk to you about the case, tell the bailiff immediately. Nobody did.

He said all of this plainly, without talking down to us, and he thanked us at the start and the end of every single day. I hadn't expected that.

Nobody warns you about the waiting. We would be told to report at 9:00 and then sit in the jury room until 9:45 because the lawyers and the judge were arguing about something we weren't allowed to hear. In the middle of testimony the bailiff would stand up and walk us out, and we would sit for twenty minutes, and then walk back in, and nobody would tell us why. I understand now that this is the system working as it should: they were settling what we could and couldn't be shown, out of our hearing so it couldn't influence us. At the time it felt like being sent to the hall.

The jury room had a long table, twelve chairs, a coffee maker that we took turns bringing grounds for, a window that looked at the parking garage, and a stack of old magazines. We were not allowed to discuss the case, so we discussed everything else: the weather, kids, the Y2K thing, what everybody did for a living. By the second week we were bringing in doughnuts. I would not have met a single one of those eleven people otherwise and I will think about some of them for the rest of my life.

The trial itself: witnesses, photographs, diagrams on an easel, a doctor, a police officer, an expert who talked about skid marks for an entire morning. The lawyers objected, the judge ruled, and it went on. It is slower than television and much more careful. Every document is marked and handed around. Every question has to be asked the right way. It took me a few days to see that the slowness was the fairness.

On the Thursday of the second week the judge read us the instructions, about forty minutes of them, gave us a written copy, and sent us into the jury room with the exhibits and a verdict form. The bailiff took our pagers. The door closed.

I'm not going to say what happened in there. What I will say is this: it was serious. Nobody made a joke. Nobody rushed. We picked a foreperson, we went around the table and every person spoke, we went back through the exhibits, we read the instructions out loud, more than once, and we argued, politely, for the better part of two days. People changed their minds and said so. Twelve strangers who had nothing in common took an oath and then did exactly what they'd promised to do, as carefully as they knew how. I have been in a lot of meetings in my life. I have never been in a room where people tried harder to get something right.

On Friday afternoon we knocked on the door and told the bailiff we had a verdict. The foreperson handed the form to the judge, the clerk read it out, each of us was asked if that was our verdict, and each of us said yes. The judge thanked us again, told us we were released from the order not to discuss the case, said we were free to talk about it or not as we chose, and told us to go home. I chose not. It was over, and it belonged to the people in the case, not to me.

Twelve dollars. Parking in the garage was $5. Lunch downtown was about $6. So on the days my company didn't pay me, I lost money to serve. A woman on our jury who cleaned houses lost two weeks of income and there was nothing anybody could do about it. I mention this not to complain (I got off easy) but because everybody talks about how to get out of jury duty, and the honest reason a lot of people try is that they can't afford to be there. If our county paid a fair day's wage, more people could serve and juries would look more like the county. That's something to write your county commissioners about, and I have.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Two people had a dispute they couldn't settle between themselves. Instead of it being decided by whoever was richer, or louder, or better connected, it was decided by twelve ordinary people who had never heard of either of them, who were told the rules, shown the evidence, and trusted to be fair. Nobody paid us. Nobody could pressure us. We didn't know anybody. That's the whole idea, and it is, when you're sitting inside it, a remarkable thing.

It's inconvenient. It's slow. It costs you money. The chairs are hard. And it is one of maybe three or four things a regular citizen is ever asked to do for the country that actually matters, and the only one where you're the one making the decision. Voting is one person in a million. On a jury you're one in twelve.

So when the envelope comes: groan if you want to. Then go. Take a book for the waiting. Bring doughnuts the second week. Pay attention. It'll be over before you know it, and you'll be a slightly different person on the other side of it. I was.

Other civic-minded pages here on GeoCities.us that I've found worth reading: Vote 2000: A Citizen's Guide, Letters to the Editor: A Citizen's Notebook, and Mrs. Fowler's Civics Corner, which is written for eighth graders and which I wish I'd read before I was 44.