McFreedom

The Washington Post is reporting that President Bush is considering pushing for a Revival of civics class. Apparently only 10% of high school students take a civics class, today.

I think this is a great idea, especially after my jury experience of a few days ago. 70 people were in my group called to the courtroom. They selected 18 of us to be the initial prospective jurors. I was one of the initial 18. We then went through an interview process, during which the Judge could excuse any of us "for cause." The vast majority of these people were excused for their opinions, not for economic cause. Economic cause didn't even come up, for most of them. Each person was asked about occupation, family, whether they'd ever been a victim of a crime, and whether they'd ever been arrested for a crime. I got to sit there for a total of ten hours over two days and listen to person after person after person detail every minor property theft they'd ever experienced and try to twist the details such that it made them so biased against anyone accused of a crime that they didn't have to sit. And if that didn't work they'd just start making outbursts about how obviously guilty the defendant was until the Judge excused them.

After the Judge had filtered them, each attorney got 10 "preemptory" challenges they could use for no reason, and then another 2 each to use on the alternate jurors. 70 people walked into the coutroom. 9 were never called. 22 were excused preemptorily (many, again, after trying to trump up any political opinion or familiar law-enforcement relationship in order to try to get one side or the other to exuse them). 12 were selected as jurors (me among them) and 2 as alternates. 25 were excused for cause. So, 67% of the prospective jurors were unsuitable, most of them because they weasled out of it. What you had left was a group either too stupid or too civically minded to lie to the judge to get out of four days' work (turned into six by all the people who dragged out the jury selection process). The defendent is a poor hispanic; all the obviously hispanic people in the pool either didn't know English well enough to answer the judge's questions, or pretended to not know English well enough, and were eliminated.

This is a juror of one's peers, how, exactly?