Jury duty

So I've been serving jury duty the past three days. The Municipal Court, downtown, where Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest. The first day I spent all day in the jury room, reading Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins -- an interesting Hellenistic romance with definite resonances with The Tempest. Wednesday morning I was placed on a jury for the first time in my life. It was a Minor in Possession case, which seemed a bizarre case to have made it to a jury. A few in the jury pool expressed incredulity during the voir dire. Those of us chosen for the jury listened to the prosecution ask questions of a policeman, interrupted many times by defense objections and by sidebars. We were sent to lunch. We were sent home after lunch.

Thursday morning we waited an hour, were called into court, and were dismissed for good. The charge had been settled in some other way, but we couldn't be told the details. The defendant was eighteen when she was stopped for speeding in Ballard last August. She had two teen-aged friends with her, and the officer smelled alcohol. She admitted that she'd had one or two beers at a party. He arrested her for a DUI (minors only need a blood alcohol of .02 to be arrested for a DUI, compared to .08 for adults) and after she talked to a public defender, she refused a breathalyzer test at the cost of losing her drivers license for a year.

So why did this misdemeanor case get as far as it did? Maybe she hoped a sympathetic jury would allow her to escape the MIP as well as the DUI, or maybe her parents were forcing her to go to jury to see how serious her fuck-up was. Strange brinkmanship in either case, but maybe the reason is something else entirely.