Law and Disorder (LynnK)

When called to the bar, I’m generally looking forward to a strawberry margarita. But for the last several days, all I got was Jury Duty.

Many were called, and too many were chosen. Including me. In the San Diego Superior Court, as much as possible is done to make the experience tolerable. Full credit to everyone involved. But I kept wishing that I was elsewhere.

For starters, I was amazed at the selection process, which took hours and hours. Several hundred potentials waited in the jury lounge, reading or doing puzzles, hoping never to hear their names. But on the fifth round of victim-selection, mine was intoned. Eventually forty-five rather breathless sheep were herded into a tiny courtroom at the farthest end of the building, which is nearly three blocks long. Two streets run under that building!

My first thought, as I walked in and saw the people standing by the tables and facing us, was that we'd come into the land of the baby lawyers. That augured well for a fairly minor trial (not minor for the accused, to be sure), and I didn’t expect it would last very long.

Anyway, it was my bad luck to draw one of the seats in the jury box itself, which meant I'd have to be "excused with the thanks of the court" to escape. The judge was tall and lean, with a neatly trimmed goatee-style beard, rather like one a Renaissance aristocrat might wear. He looked quite distinguished in his robe . . . except for a bilious green bow tie. A bow tie is never a good fashion choice, and had that one been any larger, he’d have been in clown territory.

We each had a copy of the jury questions to be answered. And damned if he wasn't going to make all 45 of us go through the process. Plus he asked for all sorts of clarifications. I'd been told by a friend, who had been told by a judge, that my Coronado residency would likely get me excluded by the defense. The perception is that we Coronadans are uptight law-'n'-order types. I had hopes of catching the next bus home.

There were a dozen or so questions, many related to association with law enforcement, the legal profession, etc. I (Juror #10) started through them, giving name, residence, profession (writer, self-employed), and got to the one about who lives in the household, their professions, etc.

I said, simply, "I live alone with a cat," and moved swiftly through the other stuff. At the end, already under oath, I swore that I could be impartial.

Then the judge said, "You have a cat? What kind of cat?"

Say what? He's asking me about my cat?

"Abyssinian," sez I. He writes it down.

"What's the cat's name?"

Good grief! "Lymond de Sevigny." Again, he writes. Probably writing "stupid-ass cat name."

And now I'm firmly established as the Crazy Cat Lady from Coronado.

"You said you are a writer. What do you write?"

Heeere we go. "Romance novels."

A palpable stir in the courtroom. I'd been looking over at the judge, but from the corner of my eye, I could see everyone regarding me intently. Make that the Crazy Cat Lady of Coronado who sits alone in her apartment hunt/pecking goopy stories on her antique Underwood.

You'd think all that would have served to get me sprung. But hours later, when 45 people had been questioned by the judge, and we'd been vaguely questioned (more speechifying than questions) by the baby lawyers (no questions addressed to me), the dismissals began. There were quite a few, most of them male, and when the dust settled, we were eleven females and one token Y chromosome.

I expect the Defense thought females would be more sympathetic to their client, a young, attractive woman accused of misdemeanor battery (one count) against her neatly attractive and cohabiting boyfriend, who stands eight inches taller than she. No injury to speak of. I figured this trial would be quickly done with.

Days later, we’d heard many hours of law-enforcement reports and conflicting he-said, she-said testimony. Utter calm and meticulous kindness from him. Tears and inconsistency from her. The cause of their fights was his obsession with an incident in her past involving rape, with perhaps some complicity on her part. Or none. That was never clear. The boyfriend said he accepted her story, except that he’d been told otherwise by someone who knew one of the guys involved. In real life, he kept questioning and punishing her.

Most of the testimony concerned three separate domestic violence incidents that involved law enforcement, two of them resulting in arrests (one for her, one for him). All involved alcohol. All were more dramatic than the one related to the charge at hand.

We looked at large pictures of barely visible injuries on the plaintiff’s back and neck and, directly after lunch, at a picture of his scrotum. A wrench had been thrown. A lamp had been tossed or "laid" under a table. Wildly different stories involved a golf club.

The prosecutor was quiet, precise, and thorough. The defense attorney paced and ranted and painted the accused as the victim in a melodramatic fashion that didn’t work for me.

At the end, confined in a small jury room, we meticulously reviewed the evidence, expressed our opinions, and made a chart related to the one count of battery in the charge. There was general agreement that the soft-spoken guy was a controlling, emotionally abusive jerk. No one liked him the least little bit. Naturally, we wondered why these two people had remained, for a year and a half, in a dysfunctional relationship punctuated by (admittedly mild) violence. The question of female on male violence came up once in the initial jury selection, but none of us batted an eyelash at that factor. Violence is violence, and if males are more prone to physical action (one word: testosterone), females don’t get a pass when they cut loose.

The verdict? Guilty as charged. I suspect that privately, most of us hoped the accused would
get some help and little or no jail time. Since I don’t intend to seek out the public records, I’ll never learn what the sentence was.

Some of the jurors and, later, other folks I’ve spoken to about the case have asked, "Are you going to use this in a book?" Nooooooo! (Shudder!)

During the trial, I probably absorbed a better understanding of human nature, especially the non-desirable elements and some of the dark vulnerabilities. But like most writers, I do that at 7-Eleven buying a Slurpee. It’s all grist for the mill, our life experiences. Happily, grist is indistinguishable. I can let those hapless, anonymous people get on with their lives.

As for my own stories, I’ll continue to create all-new people who choose not to spin in the endless dry-cycle of past experiences. No happy endings to be found there!