Though living in the same area for decades, I never had to serve on a jury until after I retired. Five years ago I had my first experience on a jury for a criminal trial. While I thought it was stressful, and interesting in the abstract, the whole process lasted little over a week. This year I again received a summons and ultimately ended up having to serve on a jury. This case was much more heavy, more complex in terms of evidence and in the number of charges. The jury selection was pretty involved, going through a lot of people to get the final jury. The whole process (jury selection, trial, deliberations) ended up taking about 4 weeks this time. It’s a little scary thinking of being possibly subject to that much time obligation every 12 months.
On the downside, from a personal perspective it was a major inconvenience. I had 3 photo shoots scheduled during April, two with models I had never worked with before. Luckily when I got the summons, I was able to move one up a few days to the weekend before I reported (Denisa Strakova). I had to cancel the other two, resulting in having to pay $$$ in cancelation fees. The subject of the trial was also quite heavy and difficult to have to listen to — but important. The charges involved a number of serious felonies. It was like being back at a job: I had to get up early every day and do an hour-and-a-half commute to and from the courthouse, arriving home pretty toasted.
On the positive side, separating it from the horror of the crime, it was interesting to learn about forensic DNA. A significant amount of the evidence had to do with DNA and we had to be “educated” on the subject in order to understand the testimony. Another positive was that we seemed to have a good jury who got along very well together, which made the challenging aspects of deliberations go smoother. There was a sense that we might maintain contacts after the trial. In particular, I discovered one of the jurors lived quite close to me and we ended up car pooling to the BART to go to court everyday. I always find jury duty important to have done, but it’s also something that since I’d done it once I didn’t really have a desire to do it again.
A wild postscript: we obviously couldn’t do any research on the case before or during our service on the jury. But after finishing and returning home, one of the jurors sent me a link that indicated that our defendant had also been charged with another murder that happened around the same time as one of the crimes in our case. Apparently he was found not guilty in that case. Other reporting indicates he was implicated in a number of other cases. He is apparently a very bad dude.
After dropping in for a short bit on the annual VDM birthday party, I joined Bob and a friend attending the Sparc Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As a number of issues arose this summer that made me decide not to try and attend a number of my usual Shakespeare festivals or other plays, this is probably the only play and in particular Shakespeare play that I will probably see this year. Sad in many ways, but hopefully future years will get me back into that rhythm.
![[o]](https://dnblog.nikkel.org/sent/2020/04/dslr20.png){kind=small}
Tonight I went into the city with Bob to see 
