LIVING WITH MCL

Finally my day in court, for jury selection in the sentencing hearing  I posted about to two weeks ago , was upon me. I arrived at the courthouse yesterday around 2 PM, had my parking validated, and then proceeded to the courtroom. I thought I was going to have to wait at least an hour while everyone before me was called in and questioned. Then, when it was my turn, I would be reprimanded for wasting the court's time, by not speaking up earlier about my views on the death penalty. Instead, too my surprise, within about 10 minutes of arriving at the courtroom, I was called in, along with 3 others, and we were all summarily dismissed. The judge thanked us for our service, even commenting about the onerousness of the questionnaire, and explaining how it is used to weed out jurors such as us. He ended by cautioning us against talking to anyone about the case, before we left the courthouse, and then added not to blog, Twitter or Facebook about it either. He claims he surfs the net. I sm...

Was called to jury duty today , and as anticipated, I was called for the first jury pool. And it was a doozy. It was a murder sentencing hearing. The guy's already been convicted, so I couldn't use my tried and true method of getting out of serving, which is the "innocent until proven guilty" approach. You see, I don't hold to that theory, since if that were the case, the person would not have been arrested, or even put on trial. There is obviously a presumption of guilt, or no one would ever face trial. Normally this part of the trial is handled by the convicting jury, but in this case, the original death sentence was overturned, so unable to come up with a way to nip this in the bud, I had no choice, but to succumb to completing a 30 page, 270+ questionnaire. I'm still feeling pretty good though, since I don't believe in the death penalty. All I needed to do is fill out the questionnaire, turn it into the court, and after a review I would be dismissed. T...