« TT: Professional courtesy | Main | TT: Just in case you were wondering »
January 15, 2004
TT: Sprung
I found the following note in my e-mailbox this morning:Perverse as it will seem to you, I have always liked jury duty, as a great escape. My last stint began on 9/11, and we were evacuated just in time for me to see the second tower collapse.
I also found the weather forecast for Thursday, printed in capital letters and sounding very much like a message in a fortune cookie: TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED THIS MORNING. Opening the blinds, I saw five inches of freshly fallen snow. I bundled up, headed downstairs, and started to make my way from the Upper West Side to the courthouse at 111 Centre Street. It was nine a.m., an hour before I was scheduled to report for my second day of jury duty.
No subway line goes directly from my neighborhood to Centre Street, and I didn't care to walk halfway across town from the Canal Street station to the courthouse in eight-degree weather, so I trudged four blocks north to the nearest bus stop, figuring to take a crosstown bus through Central Park to the Lexington Avenue subway line, board a southbound express train, and change for the local at Fourteenth Street, emerging just two blocks from the courthouse. (If you live anywhere but New York, that itinerary will give you a taste of the travel-related decisions we carless Manhattanites make every day.) On paper, it was a brilliant plan, but it started to break down almost immediately under the pressure of real life, as such plans are wont to do on snowy winter mornings.
The trouble began at the bus stop, where I found a jam-packed crosstown bus that turned away a dozen or so shivering passengers and drove off. It was followed by two empty out-of-service buses, followed in turn by a bus into which the rest of us crammed ourselves. As anyone who has boarded a New York bus at rush hour will know, I use the word "crammed" literally: the last few people who forced themselves through the open door shoved me three-quarters of the way into the lap of a well-dressed woman. The going was slow and got slower, and by the time I reached Lexington Avenue, a half-hour had crawled by, most of which I spent staring at a "Poetry in Motion" placard on which was printed the last stanza of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," surely an odd choice for the purpose of diverting bored commuters. I amused myself by imagining ignorant armies clashing by night on the M86 crosstown bus, though it struck me that a line or two from Joseph Conrad might have been even better suited to the occasion. I couldn't decide whether to opt for "The horror! The horror!" or "Exterminate all the brutes!"
I got off the bus and inched my way down the snow-encrusted stairs to the subway. As I approached the turnstile, I ran into a mob of irate passengers who told me through clenched teeth that the downtown express trains weren't running. I barely caught the next local, which pulled into my station a half-hour later. From there I slithered atop the icy sidewalks to 111 Centre Street, where I lined up to file through the security checkpoint, then waited 10 minutes for an elevator. I finally reached the jury room at 10:20, just as the clerk started calling the roll.
Much to my surprise, the atmosphere in the waiting room was light--almost festive--and several of the people around me were actually chatting. A pleasant–looking woman asked me about the paperback I had pulled out of my shoulder bag, Bernard Taper's biography of George Balanchine, and assured me in return that her book, The Da Vinci Code, was excellent. I scanned the room to see what others were reading, and though most of the books on display were Ken Follett-type thrillers, a few of my fellow citizens were grappling with more ambitious fare. The woman on my right was reading The Piano Tuner, and the man just behind me had his nose in the International Herald Tribune. In the front row, a dignified-looking matron with hair done up in neat cornrows knitted away at an orange afghan, waiting patiently for the clerk's summons.
It never came. For the second day in a row, no judge anywhere in the courthouse called for a fresh panel of jurors. We were sent to lunch 45 minutes ahead of schedule, and I ran for the elevators and slid across the street to a very good Vietnamese restaurant, where I lunched with a friend who works at WNYC, whose studios are a few blocks south of the courthouse. Not long after my return, the waiting-room chatter sputtered, fizzled, and died out, replaced by a thick, resentful silence. I opened up The Wall Street Journal and buried myself in a review of a Hans Hofmann retrospective at the Naples Museum of Art, trying without success to imagine a more complete inversion of my immediate situation than strolling through a Florida museum, looking at brightly colored canvases by one of my favorite painters.
Somehow, another hour passed. Then, without warning, the cheerfully cynical red-faced man who had given us our orientation lecture the previous morning popped out of the clerks' office and announced that we could all pick up our certificates of jury service, after which we would be exempt from further service for four years. I expected at least a few cheers, but nobody made a sound. Instead, we made our way one by one to the desk, picked up our certificates, and left.
I treated myself to a cab--I'd already spent plenty of time on buses and subways--and as the driver pulled onto the West Side Highway, I realized, much to my surprise, that I felt strangely disappointed. It happens that I've never actually served on a jury. (I was empaneled in a civil case a few years ago, but the plaintiffs settled as soon as the attorneys finished their opening statements.) In spite of my exasperation at having made the trek to Centre Street in sub-freezing temperatures, I must have been looking forward, consciously or not, to the prospect of finally sitting in judgment on a defendant. But my short-lived pique was gone by the time the cab pulled up to my building, and a half-minute later I was back in my nice warm apartment, my civic duty done until 2008. The great escape was over.
Posted January 15, 2004 9:48 AM
