I was scheduled to be on jury duty all week.

Monday morning, I parked at a restaurant a few miles from my house and took an express city bus in to downtown St Paul. I sat in the county courthouse basement for 4 hours and read back issues of Reminisce Magazine. Then the jury manager annouced we had 2 hours for lunch! Two hours! I hardly knew what to do with myself!

I walked all around downtown St Paul, I hadn't been there for so long! In the few years after college, I used to take the bus to downtown St Paul when I had nothing else to do. I can remember the summer after I graduated from college, the city of St. Paul built a 3 floor shopping mall with countless little shops, restaurants, and an interrior courtyard with a fountain. It seemed so glamourous and it was always full of people of all ages. Now that mall is converted entirely in to office space. No shops. The fountain is still there. I ate at a downtown Subway sandwich shop. It's been years since I ate at Subway. My kids hate it.

I was looking forward to another few hours of reading and rest in the afternoon as well. But instead I was one of 21 people called in to a court room. In the courtroom were the female judge, the adorable 20-something male court clerk, two attorneys, and a man who appeared to be in his thirties. The judge asked all to sit in the jury box and someother nearby seats and asked most of us all the same question. What neighborhood do you live in, what is your occupation, what is your educational background, if you're married what is your spouses occupation, what is your spouses occupational background. then the attorneys, one male and one female, asked each of us specific questions based on our answers to the judge's questions. One of them asked me specifically how I started working in tech support if I majored in linguistics. One potential juror panicked when he found out the defendent was previously convited for sexual assault. He just insisted no, he could never be impartial towards this man's current case. The judge asked that man to go back downstairs immediately and then replaced him with one of the few who were not already seated in or near the jury box.

When all the questioning was over, the judge met with the 2 attorneys, she then asked 13 of us, including me, to stay, and the rest to go back downstairs again. So much for my week of rest and relaxation in the basement of the county courthouse.

The next morning I took the express bus again and got downtown an hour early. It allowed me to stop in a coffee shop and have cocoa and a muffin, and look out the window in to downtown St Paul and see that I didn't recognize anyone. There was a time when I used to run in to former college classmates in downtown St Paul, but many of them have moved on since then.

I reported to the court house. There were tv cameras in the lobby because of anohter , high profile, trial going on on another floor. But that case was not ours. For reasons we did not understand until later, and even now I don't entirely understand, the defendent had already, previously, been tried and convited for assault and several other violent crime charges. He was already found guilty. He was already in jail. It was not our job to find him guilty or innocent. It was our job to determine if the assault he had committed, was committed "with particular cruelty."

The descriptions from the paramedic, police officer and the hospital trauma surgeon were gruesome and harsh. We were shown countless large photograhps of the victim's bruises, cuts, burns and even bite marks. This was a case of the State vs the defendent. The victim herself was not present. A grown adult male juror behind me either siezured or fainted while we were being shown the photos, and we were all hearded back out in to the hallway and in to an unused court room while he was removed. That's why they chose 13 jurors, for cases like this. Now we still had 12.

We had an hour and a half for lunch! Again, I enjoyed wandering around downtown St Paul, and got a look at the newly remodeled St. Paul Library. I looked to see if one of my remaining friends, who works there, was on duty, but I didn't see her.

That afternoon, all us jurors arrived back at the appointed time, but the courtoom was not ready for us. We had to sit out in the hall , which only had one bench, with enough room for about 5 people to sit on, so the rest of us stood or sat on the floor. Suddenly another courtroom door burst open. We could hear weeping, protesting and greiving from inside. The maybe-20 year old son was lead away in handcuff, while the teen age girl friends cried in to their cell phones that het got 5 years, and the mom threw a theatrical nervous breakdown in front of all of us, right there in the hall.

We returned to the court room for more brutal descriptions of the assault. Finally us jurors were lead in to a meeting room. No one volunteered to be the forman, so I did. There was little to discuss. Yes he had treated the victim with "particular cruelty" no matter how you define it. As forman there was so little debate and such a ready "yes" answer from everyone, that I asked each person to assure me that they had voted yes, from their own concience, and not due to peer pressure. But I knew the answer. It was pretty obvious. I signed the paper, saying it was unanimous.

But the judge left us there for about 1/2 hour while she attended another meeting, so we were stuck in there. For the first time, we jurors got the opportunity to just talk and gossip. How theatrical the attorney for the state acted. How hapless the attorney for the defendent was, but then again how little he had to work with. How the defendent seemed bored with the grusome descriptions and photos of his own crime. How no one but me liked sitting downstairs reading magazines. How lucky we felt that we weren't on that high profile trial on another floor. They had spent weeks living in a hotel and could only go to lunch in pairs, and with a guard! And how creepy it felt to actually be in the same room as someone who put so much time and effort in to such a malicious assault. I was the only one who knew what the "F.T.W" tatoo meant, on his fingers. It means "Fuck the World." I've seen it before.

We returned to the court room. I handed the paper to the court clerk and it was he who read our "yes" verdict. The the attorney for the defendent asked that each of our names be called and each of us state our own answer. We each voted yes, out loud, individually, with no hesitation. Some of the other jurors told me, later , that they made sure to look the defendent right in the eyes as they answered. But I just didn't think of it.

The judge asked us jurors to go back to the meeting room. She explained to us, then , a lot of the details that had not been explained previously. We were the first jury either in the county or the state, I forget, to have to hear just this part of a court case. It had to do with the fact that between the time of the original assault trial, and now, the time of his appeal, the law had changed so that only a jury, not the judge, could determine "particular cruelty." The vicitm only got away when the assailent fell asleep. She lives out of state now, but is doing "OK." The judge, with the help of the trauma surgeon who had been speaking, determined that the juror behind me had fainted due to the severe graphic nature of the medical pictures, and had been released to go get medical care. I still say that was a seizure.

I made it out just in time to catch the bus to my home park and ride lot. And the even better news? I was released from jury duty and was able to just go back to work Wednesday morning, after telling everyone I would be out for a week. I was never so glad to be back to work!