Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

This week on Monday I was called to jury duty in Ukiah and did not get picked for a jury or even picked for the group who were sent up to courtroom E as potential jurors. I was in the group that gets to sit around the jury room most of the day doing nothing. You are instructed to arrive for jury duty at 9 a.m. At about 9:35 a.m. a very nice woman who is charge of the office explains all the rules about jury duty, where you should be parked and where you should not be parked and what the going pittance for jury duty is and the fact that you're probably not going to see a dime of it unless you get picked for a jury. This woman has her rap down pat and is very careful to make sure that it is crystal clear that she personally has nothing to do with any of these rules and that none of us should feel that we can A) Blame her, B) Get mad at her or C) prevail upon her to change the rules.
By about 10:30 a.m. a big group picked - we are assured - randomly by the computer, are sent up to Courtroom E for what is described as a civil suit - meaning not criminal. The bad part was that it was estimated that this trial would take 5 days. Anyone with Labor Day weekend plans were in a bad way right about then.
Anyway, the rest of us were told we could leave the jury room but needed to be back at 1:30 p.m. in case the first 30 people they sent up don't make a jury of 12 plus alternates and they need more potential jurors to pick from. That's a three hour window to do any number of things. If you're from the coast, like a number of people I heard talking were, there's not much you can do but find a place to hang out.
I asked the nice lady if there was a phone number she could give me that I could call at about 12:30 p.m. to see if a jury had indeed been picked, and then I wouldn't need to come all the way back to the courthouse. She handed me a card with the phone number of the jury room.
What she didn't tell me was that the phone line she gave me would have a message on it telling me the jury room was closed until 1 p.m. and then at 1 p.m. would have a message on it telling me that whatever my question was, there was no one to help me with it at 1 p.m. or any other time.
So I trundled on back to the courthouse jury room at 1:30 p.m. and sat reading until about 3:30 p.m. when the nice lady said that the attorneys upstairs were very, very close to having a jury but the judge wanted five more people sent up.
Again, very careful to make it clear she had no idea why just five and that the five names she was about to call were from the computer and had NOTHING TO DO WITH HER, she named five people and the rest of us were free to go home and worry no more until 2009.
Was it torture? No. I had a good book to read and Mondays are my late day at the newspaper anyway so I wasn't missing anything I would normally be doing.
But here are a couple of ideas for the folks working at the courthouse - and by that I mean judges since they're the ones that decide these things - to make this easier on jurors.
1. Get more comfortable chairs. Ever see what a judge sits in all day? I'm not even suggesting something that comfy, but a chair with arms and some cushioning would be nice.
2. Have a number with a current message or a real person for jurors to call between when they're told they can leave temporarily and when they have to be back so that they can get an immediate update on the situation. When you tell people they can leave for three hours and they may or may not be needed then, why not have a phone number they can call to see if they are indeed needed? In this case there was a chance that a jury might have been picked by 11:15 a.m. and several dozen people would come back to the courthouse from all over the Ukiah Valley at 1:30 p.m. needlessly. I have had this happen in the past. And while it's always a relief to hear "You're dismissed," it's also a pain in the butt to come back to court just to be told to go away.
3. Why not get several dozen of those short range pagers busy restaurants have so that patrons waiting for tables can go shop close by while they wait, and give them to waiting jurors? Just think of the downtwon shopping or coffee drinking and snack eating I could have done in just a two or three block radius downtown between 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. With my trusty pager in hand I could wander up and down School Street and still be back in the courthouse in minutes if they needed me.
Just a thought.