MY BRUSH WITH JURY DUTY

What a couple of sleepless-night weeks it's been! Last night (midnight) I launched new web sites for my Fortune 200 company -- the corporate site and the site for our largest business unit (ten million visits per month). Kudos all round, thank goodness, with no major glitches. I'll be spending Sunday editing a film to kick off a big leadership meeting we're hosting next week. But between now and then, I'm FREE!!!!! Now to catch up on the news.

Actually, before I do that, I want to record (so as to remember) my experience this afternoon on jury duty. I'd been called several times before, but always instructed to report in the morning. This was a 1:30 p.m. call, which nobody I talked to had ever experienced. The jury summons said it was a "special venire" -- so I Googled and found that in Texas that applies to capital crimes.

I don't know about other states, but in Texas there are all sorts of capital crimes -- e.g., murder of a child less than six years old, murder of a police officer or firefighter while they are performing their duties, deliberate killing of a person during the commission of another felony, etc. This case is one of felony murder. The defendant is accused of, in the course of a robbery, strangling and drowning a man.

It seemed as if several hundred people were in the Central Jury Room when I arrived. The trial judge, prosecutors, defense team and defendant were introduced. Only the defendant did not speak. There was nearly an hour of instructions on the law, the obligations of jury duty, and the seriousness of the case. Judge Lana read the indictment. She said it might take six weeks to select the jury, and months to conduct the trial. I started to quake. I'm a pushover for real Americanism, and jury duty, like voting, seems to be a requirement of good citizenship. But MONTHS? I can't even find time for a long weekend (not for the past year) -- how on earth could I take off that kind of time from work without having to work through every night to keep things going? This is not a good prospect, coming at me at the end of two weeks of three-hours-of-sleep-per-night. The judge asks us to look at our 16-page questionnaires and implores us not to frame our answers so as to try to get off the jury, but yet to think seriously about our feelings about the death penalty.

Could I condemn someone to death? I could have done so for Ted Bundy. I'd have opted for life first, but he'd proven prison couldn't hold him. And every time Ted got loose he killed more women. He was like the Biblical man-eating lion that must be put to death because there's no other way to stop him from killing others. Yes, there are some cases in which I could vote in favor of the death penalty.

Only a few. On the whole, the death penalty troubles me, and mostly because of the uneven way in which it's applied. There are racial, gender and economic factors implicated in death penalty cases that make our current system immoral.

But still. It's not, to say the least, a privilege I would seek out. While I might say that I'm not sitting in judgment upon the man but upon his actions, it still would FEEL like sitting in judgment on him. And you know me, good little Bible-believer that I am, I hear in my head every day, "Judge not that ye be not judged." I don't want to go there.

Oh, I judge actions and such every day of the week, yes, you bet. This blog is full of them. What I shrink from is personally assessing recompense.

Wait, it just hit me. There's no way any Texas prosecutors are going to let me on this jury. My answer to the question, "What three publicly known men do you least admire?" was:

1. George W. Bush
2. Dick Cheney
3. Antonin Scalia

That should do it.

UPDATE: Note: That was not MOST admired, they're my LEAST admired. For most admired, I put down Al Gore, Jim Wallis ("God's Politics") and Jimmy Carter.

For most admired women, I wrote Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton and Rosalynn Carter.

For least admired women I listed Condi Rice, Laura Bush and Barbara Bush.