{"id":1113,"date":"2007-03-08T11:16:06","date_gmt":"2007-03-08T15:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2007\/03\/08\/my-civic-obligation\/"},"modified":"2007-03-08T11:17:01","modified_gmt":"2007-03-08T15:17:01","slug":"my-civic-obligation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2007\/03\/08\/my-civic-obligation\/","title":{"rendered":"My Civic Obligation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a busy 48 hours. On Tuesday, I had my first dental cleaning in nearly a year (I had to cancel my scheduled one at the end of last year because of my trip to Japan). Despite that fact that the new dental hygienist was a bit sadistic with the scraper, I came out with no cavities.<\/p>\n<p>Then yesterday I had jury duty&#8230;.for the fifth time in my life. Five times! I must admit this ROYALLY pisses me off since I know people my age who have never had it. Hell, my mother didn&#8217;t have her first jury duty until she was 70 years old. Yet I can&#8217;t go three years without getting it. In fact, my name is so popular in their computer system for some reason that I&#8217;ve been assigned jury duty\u00a0two additional times but was disqualified since I had served within the previous three years.<\/p>\n<p>So, let&#8217;s count them&#8230;.7 times in 17 years. That means I get called every 2.4 years, on average. This just doesn&#8217;t seem fair to me.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, here are the things I hate about jury duty in Boston.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I live just a few blocks from two courthouses. So which court did I get assigned to? The one that&#8217;s\u00a0over 30 minutes away in freaking Jamaica Plain, of course\u00a0&#8211; practically the entire other side of the city.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>When I got off the subway at Forest Hills (the very last stop) there were signs leading me to the courthouse. But once I got to the street, the last sign had\u00a0bumper stickers all over the arrow indicating the direction of the courthouse. I took a guess&#8230;and I was wrong and ended up going a block in the wrong direction. Yesterday morning was 5 degrees with a wind chill below zero. Did I mention that the other courthouses were just\u00a0a few blocks my house?<\/li>\n<li>I arrived prompty at 8AM (as was indicated on my summons) to find the courthouse locked and secure. The sign on the main door said &#8220;Court hours, 8:30 to 4:30&#8221;. Then why the hell have us come at 8:00AM? There was another side door that said jurors should appear at 8:00. Why not just say the building opens at 8:00AM then?<\/li>\n<li>The informational video they show\u00a0jurors was produced in the 80&#8217;s or 90&#8217;s. Video&#8230;not DVD&#8230;video. And this video has evidently been playing for years because the visual and sound quality were very deteriorated. I mean, I know the court system isn&#8217;t overflowing with money&#8230;.but it&#8217;s pretty cheap to burn DVD&#8217;s nowadays. They might want to consider it.<\/li>\n<li>The waiting. As I said, I&#8217;ve been on jury duty 5 times (and picked to a trial once). NEVER have they brought the jurors into a courtroom for impanelment before 11AM. Since that&#8217;s the case, why do they make us show up at such an ungodly hour of the day? Why not have us arrive at 9AM or 10AM? People&#8217;s biggest complain is the waiting&#8230;so why not make it so we wait less? A comfortable chair or two wouldn&#8217;t hurt, either.<\/li>\n<li>Finally &#8211; and this is my biggest wish&#8230;continue the process of making people eligible for jury duty every three years. That seems fair.\u00a0However, if somebody has actually been a juror on an actual\u00a0trial, take them off the list. They&#8217;ve done their civic duty. It&#8217;s no fair that the same people (ME) keep getting called back.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That said, I didn&#8217;t get picked for a trial yesterday. I came close, though.\u00a0They stopped placing people in the jury stand (for a DUI case) at juror number 23. I was juror number 24.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, enough about that (I&#8217;m becoming such a misanthrope). I had a nice night with Randy and life is back to normal. Oh, and going back to my last blog posting about how I find San Francisco ugly &#8211; here are some photos of Randy&#8217;s trip last week that show what I&#8217;m talking about. I just don&#8217;t find it pretty. There are pretty things in San Francisco (city hall, Golden Gate Park, the painted ladies of Pacific Heights, Land&#8217;s End) but overall I have trouble finding any cohesive beauty or charm. Notice the telephone\/bus wires in the first and last photos? Notice the sea of white buildings?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"329\" alt=\"San Francisco California March 2007 3-2-2007 4-33-42 PM.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/files\/2007\/03\/San%20Francisco%20California%20March%202007%203-2-2007%204-33-42%20PM.jpg\" width=\"402\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"304\" alt=\"San Francisco California March 2007 3-2-2007 5-05-05 PM.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/files\/2007\/03\/San%20Francisco%20California%20March%202007%203-2-2007%205-05-05%20PM.jpg\" width=\"402\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"303\" alt=\"San Francisco California March 2007 3-2-2007 3-32-36 PM.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/files\/2007\/03\/San%20Francisco%20California%20March%202007%203-2-2007%203-32-36%20PM.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a busy 48 hours. On Tuesday, I had my first dental cleaning in nearly a year (I had to cancel my scheduled one at the end of last year because of my trip to Japan). Despite that fact that the new dental hygienist was a bit sadistic with the scraper, I came out [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}