Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Last month my jury duty service brought me to the courtroom where a murder trial was being conducted. I was not selected for the jury. Dozens of us were dismissed even before being interviewed in the process called voir dire. Once my service as a prospective juror ended I remained curious about the case. I started searching for news about the murder, the victim, and the goings-on in the trial. I found...next to nothing. There was no local news coverage about the trial. For a murder!

I thought about it again today. It's been a few weeks since I last went looking. It's now past the point where the judge predicted the trial would be complete. Again I've found next to nothing. Five (scraps of) Things I did find:

• The superior court's online records are laughably poor. Like, "Welcome back to the internet circa 1998" poor. It's silly that Santa Clara County, the literal home of Silicon Valley, has such primitive IT.


• The records don't indicate what verdict was rendered, or even explicitly if a verdict was rendered. I can only surmise that the two defendants were convicted of something as the records show sentencing hearings scheduled 3 months from now.


• With multiple searches, both on Google and on the major local newspaper's own site, I found only two articles about the murder. One was from February 2021, shortly after it occurred; the other from March 2021, when the defendants were charged.


• There is zero news coverage of the trial. Yes, I consider my searching fairly specific. I know the full names of the defendants, the victim, and the judge, plus the name of the venue where the trial occurred. Zero.


• There is no news coverage of the victim. The two articles I mentioned above identify him only by name and age. There's no mention of where he lived, what his job was, who his grieving friends and family are, etc.

The news vacuum around this case reminds of something I read in a lengthy news piece a few years ago about the confessions of a serial killer. He noted that he got away with so many murders because the authorities, the news, and the public at large didn't care about the people he murdered. Once the victims were tied— rightly or wrongly— to drug gangs, the authorities stopped searching so hard, the news stopped reporting it, and people moved past it. It was like, "Oh, another alleged drug trafficker got killed, nothing to see here."

Was the victim in this case associated with illegal drugs— or anything else illegal, immoral, or unpopular? I don't know; I can't find any details! But it was stated in the charges of the trial that the defendants are alleged gang members and allegedly committed the murders as part of a gang. But more than that, I don't know. And I only know that because I was in the room when the judge read the charges. That's more than can be said for the news media, apparently.

I went back to the courthouse today for jury duty. Technically it was Day 3 of jury duty but also my second day at the courthouse. Recall that Day 1 was waiting at home 2.5 weeks ago, Day 2 was being summoned to the courthouse to be attached to a trial and asked to fill out a lengthy questionnaire asking about potential biases.

Today the court was conducting voir dire, the process in which lawyers for both sides ask more in-depth questions of prospective jurors and can "challenge" them for dismissal. I didn't even get as far as questioning. At 3pm, after I'd been sitting in the juror assembly room pretty much all day, an announcement came over the loudspeaker that a full jury had been selected and the rest of us were dismissed.

Previously I'd estimated the jury pool at 50 people and hence my mathematical odds of being selected as a juror or alternate at about 1/3. Today I found the pool was actually more than twice that size. There were other days when they brought in whole other sets of people to be informed of the trial, given written questionnaires, and interviewed.

Now that my involvement with the case is concluded I can discuss public information about it. It is a murder trial. 😨

Am I happy to avoid being on a murder-trial jury? Yes and no. Yes, because I consider it an enormous responsibility to have to judge the facts in such as significant case— with significant punishment awaiting the defendants if convicted. (It at least wasn't a death penalty case.) Not to mention it would have cost me 3 weeks of work. (I'd get paid but my team would struggle to pick up what I'd drop.) On the other hand, someone has to judge the facts in those cases, and I'd rather it be someone intelligent enough to weigh the evidence and its credibility appropriately, be conscious of bias, and reason within the law. I.e., why not me. It's a responsibility I was ready to take on.

Today is Day 2 of my week of jury duty, and today I'm actually in court! Yesterday I was on standby, checking a web page twice a day to see if I needed to appear. At 5pm I got the signal to be present today.

At the moment it's not quite yet 8:30am but already here are 5 Things about this day:

• My day started getting up before my 6am alarm. I scheduled a 6:30am business call this morning to discuss critical information with colleagues who may have to do a presentation for me on Thursday morning. Like I quipped yesterday, just because I'm excused from work (with pay) for jury service doesn't mean work stops while I'm out.


• Driving to the court house in downtown San Jose reminded me of commuting. My company's office is/was in downtown San Jose, so this morning's drive was similar to my last commute. Except I haven't commuted in 4 years. Doing the drive this morning reminded me of how much commuting between home and office a) creates a clear division between "at work" and "not at work", and b) is a complete fucking waste of productivity.


• The county government complex is actually a mile north of the downtown core. It's in a drab area where there's pretty much nothing else... including food choices. Lunch might be a matter of deciding whether stuff in the vending machine looks more appetizing than the protein bar I tucked in my bag.


• The county government complex provides one example after another of "Great idea, poor execution". From the parking garage there's a pedestrian bridge across the street... but it doesn't connect to the buildings. Along the 3rd floor bridge are kiosks for paying for parking... except they're all broken and covered with signs to go down to the 1st floor and pay the attendant. At the juror check-in area there are 3 kiosks for self check-in... and they, too, are all broken. There's just one staffer checking people in manually like it's still the 20th century. At 8:05 when I arrived (service starts at 8:30) there's already a long line. I wonder how bad it will be at 8:29.


• If today is anything like my last jury service 10 years ago— and all the inoperative digital systems suggest little has changed in at least that long— I'll spend most of the day sitting and waiting, then go home having done nothing. Yay, civic duty!

Update: What came next

This week I got a jury duty summons. I've rarely gotten those. The last was 10 years ago, and the only other one ever was a long time before that. When other people talk about being summoned every few years I feel like the county doesn't like me or something!

When I was younger, getting out of jury duty was a sport. The popular zeitgeist was that it was a waste of time, and anybody with a real job or a family to support practically had a responsibility to get out of it. Comedians told jokes like, "Do you want to trust your fate to a jury of 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty?"

I'm glad that zeitgeist has changed, because jury duty is important— especially for intelligent and otherwise well employed people. The justice system depends on having reasonably intelligent jurors who can understand the facts of the case, weigh the credibility of the witnesses by more than their physical attractiveness, and apply reasoning within the standards of the law. I look forward to bringing my intellect and perspective to whatever jury I serve.

There is one conflict for me, though. The week in May I was summoned for jury duty creates a cluster of activity where I'd be out of office for 4 out of 5 consecutive weeks. That's a big work disruption. Thus I filed for a brief postponement. My new week of jury service comes in June.