Jury Duties

I spent about 6 hours today in the San Mateo county jury selection process. Since you're only required to do jury duty once a year, they seem to have conveniently scheduled my notices at 366 day increments. This time I was sent with 54 others to sit in the courtroom as part of the pool for a DUI trial. How can a DUI charge be contested in a trial by jury? Since in the end I did not have to sit on the jury, I can only tell you how it was going to shape up. First, the guy on trial was cited back in 2002. Clearly he has enough money to tie this thing up. Second, he had retained an attorney who many jurors recognized from the Peterson trial. In fact, during questioning, several basically said that anyone who hired an expensive hired gun lawyer clearly had something to hide (and were then dismissed for their candor). The way it was shaping up, the prosecution would put on the breathalyzer evidence, witnesses to drunken behavior, the arresting officer, and their forensic toxicologist to testify to the accuracy and quality of the breathalyzer test. The prosecution would throw out a bunch of highly paid "experts" to testify how error prone and faulty the breathalyzer is. We present, you decide.

The other thing that went on is that people were asked if they had family or friends who had been arrested for DUI or somehow affected by a drunk driving incident. In a lot of ways, this is a kind of six degrees of separation exercise, because by the time you're done, everyone has some kind of story. Similarly, "do you have family or friends who are in law enforcement." With all these relations and friends providing great excuses for getting rid of jurors, I was contemplating pulling out the fact that my uncle's second wife's uncle was J. Edgar Hoover, fondly known in the family as Uncle Super Pig. Alas, I never had the chance. A card to be played on another day.