service to making the "right" call
I spent my entire life (and I say entire as if I've lived a long time, which I haven't) avoiding jury duty. Since turning 18 seven years ago, I've probably successfully avoided six or seven calls to duty throughout some of the major cities, Los Angeles, Alameda in the Bay Area, and New York City. I've always avoided them for then, and still now, legitimate reasons--school, out of town, moved, etc. But legitimate moral reasons? Never. It was just two simple reasons, that I did not want to go and that it was an inconvenience to me. That was it.
(I would however, argue that asking students to serve jury duty, especially the lengthy ones, is a logistical nightmare and unfair now that the college tuition being paid can purchase a state. And its neighbor.)
I opened my mailbox today afterwork and there it was, my call to service. The jury duty summons, sitting in my tiny mailbox calling my name and whispering, Can't avoid me this time sucker! My first reaction was dammit and how many times have I postponed in NYC already? Can I do it again? Then as I got upstairs and gave myself more time to think through the implications of serving, I decided that I will actually try my best to serve. Why?
Because Trayvon Martin. Because all the thousands of cases against or for people of color represented by an all-white jury. Because Trayvon Martin. Because someone has to be thinking about our own communities and not-our-own-communities outside of legal black-and-white dynamics. Because we've been making the wrong calls too many times.
Right after the verdict on Zimmerman, I read this article about the jury of that trial and how the outcome might have been different had the jury make-up been even slightly shifted. It was an article that made me rethink what jury duty means and could mean:
We'll never know. But what I do know is that in 1955 an all-white jury acquitted two men for the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till -- a murder that the men would later confess to in a magazine interview. Now, nearly 60 years later, a jury without a single black person on it acquitted George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin.
So the next time I get called for jury duty, instead of being annoyed and thinking of the inconvenience, I will think of Trayvon Martin and I will treat the summons as what it is: an honorable way to contribute to our democracy, and one of the few things I will ever do that may potentially save, or vindicate, a life.
I might make the wrong call too. But I know what it looks like and who they look like when young men and women spend their entire teenage years growing up behind bars or in residential facilities or in institutions because of a wrong call or a not-wrong call or part-of-a-right-or-wrong-call.
And the scary thing is that the more I think about serving on the jury, the more anxiety I have for holding a piece of the power that can call a sentence on another person's life. A person that I don't even know yet, or will ever know. And already, I feel the need to apologize.
But watch, I end up getting one of those boring one-day cases and head back to work as if nothing happened except the stupid inconvenience of people who really had nothing better to do than waste my time.
blakekathryn
yousharknotpass
titsay
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
pixelskylines
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