If I Had a Hammer … Makes Sense To Me!

You got the notice in the mail, and because you are a good, law-abiding citizen, you mark your calendar.

On the specified date you put on decent, law-abiding clothes and go downtown, braving traffic, parking tickets, confusion and bureaucracy. Maybe you think you're just a citizen doing your duty. You think you are a bone fide member of a constitutionally ordained jury pool, the very backbone and essence of our judicial system.

But that's not really what you are.

In fact, you're just a hammer.

You might as well be made of steel, with a big flat nose used for striking things, to be wielded with strength and purpose, though certainly not your own.

Like so many other institutions of our culture, the principle of trial by jury that underpins our judicial system has become just another source of power to be manipulated by both sides in an adversarial system of justice that has little to do with guilt or innocence.

Like professional sports, education, and commerce, our legal system has become so thoroughly diluted with politics, greed and competition that it matters little whether the person charged with a crime is actually guilty.

What is more likely to happen as a result of your responding so diligently to your jury summons is that you will likely never spend a moment sitting on an actural jury, because the prosecution and the defense will reach an agreement before a jury is actually impaneled.

The weight, or threat, of the jury hammer will have been wielded. You will have been used as a pawn in an increasingly manipulative system that is as near to justice as our modern society is capable of producing.

There is a good bit of controversy in the news these days about jurors in celebrity trials profiting from their exposure to the insider aspects of the cases. Some of them are giving interviews, writing books, etc. I figure they are entitled to any profit they can make off of anyone who cares to waste his time watching their interviews or wasting their money on a book they wrote. As for the windbags on TV talk shows who are concerned about the integrity of our jury system, they need to wake up and smell the coffee. Integrity fled the scene long ago, right on the heels of justice and common sense.

As a law-abiding citizen, there is little you can do if the call to jury duty arrives, other than sacrifice your time, your effort, and your body to become part of a hammer that does little to pound out real truth and justice.

The system needs fixing, but it will take a hammer far greater than a jury of our peers to bring about that resolution.

There is something you and your fellow citizens can do to help bring about resolution ...

You can study this link to Trial By Jury below and take a copy with you as a reference for you duties and obligations as an impaneled juror.

Trial By Jury