What on earth is it going to take for me to finally experience the joy of voir dire and being empaneled as a member of a jury of a supposed peer to the accused?!?
For the second out of three tries, I ended up getting the thumbs-down from the recorded voice message at the courthouse:
| Jury Summons Date | Juror Number | Result |
|---|---|---|
| July 2017 | 250 | Excused, juror number greater than required by the Court |
| May 2018 | 316 | Excused due to unavoidable conflict/hardship |
| June 2023 | 177 | All potential jurors excused for the entire week by the Court |
To be sure, the kids and Mistletoe and Mocha certainly made the day just as interesting (if not more so given the puppies getting zoomies!) than I’d have been downtown wondering if I was going to survive the vivisection that is voir dire and somehow find myself in the jury box.
Well, there’s always next year (ish), I suppose.
Nicholas had the lowest juror number I’ve seen in Wake County as #64 last year but he also was excused without needing to report downtown (and he could have easily gotten excused with no shame to him as a full-time student actively in classes!) but he decided to try his luck at the juror lottery and didn’t make it through.
I’ll admit that the idea of him actually making it through voir dire and onto the jury is more than a little bit amusing. Not because I think he’d dare defy a court order to be impartial and faithfully follow the orders of the court any more than I would but rather thinking of the story of the attorney that’d allow a then 19 year-old on the jury in the first instance and think it a good idea. 🙂
Mind you, Wake County still has a couple more chances to match the number of summonses that had my name on them that Volusia County sent to my father’s house inviting me to come play in their jury sandbox.
All five of the ones I know about were sent well after I’d already moved to North Carolina (and that was four and a half years after I’d left Volusia County for various stays in Orange and Seminole County during my time at university in Orlando where I’d established a permanent address and voter registration after moving away from Port Orange).
The fact that I was no longer a resident of the county or the state was an automatic disqualification from serving on one of their juries.
I’m sure Dad was desperately trying to minimise the amount of sarcasm in his voice as he’d ring up the courthouse and once again kindly suggest that this particular bird perched in another state’s tree and that they might want to fix their records. After the fifth one which was about ten years into me being back home in North Carolina, I never heard about any more summonses coming my way.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Volusia County finally decided to forgo their stubbornness and accept the reality that I never had any desire to live in Florida ever again much less serve on their jury or he just stopped telling me about them and just quietly dealt with them whilst he was out and about getting Moby Dodge’s daily automatic car wash at Daytona Dodge who I’m sure regretted giving him an all-you-can-eat car wash pass. 😉
They didn’t seem to give any fuss about missed jury duty or try to nail me for fines or contempt of court for when I was there to settle Dad’s affairs so maybe they finally gave in and accepted reality after all.
Always the bridesmaid but never the bride! Maybe I’ll get the ring the next time Wake County sends a summons round… 🙂
