In direct conflict with what everyone had told me previously, jury duty is not, actually, all about sitting in an uncomfortable chair, reading book after book and periodically eating snacks from a machine, until you are dismissed in the early afternoon with enough time left before evening to slip in a little downtown shopping.

No, jury duty is all about sitting in an uncomfortable chair, losing most of your city-granted lunch break to give time for an incompetent witness to give rambling testimony that is eventually struck from the record, watching the most cliched case this side of the People's Court.

In this day and age, who actually sues for 'pain and suffering' and 'loss of life quality' damages after a car accident? Four years after the accident, I might add. And after racking up medical bills in the thousands to treat your undocumented 'soft tissue damage' with such cutting-edge methods as electric shocks and infared rays.

Despite the fact that the plaintiff's and the defendant's descriptions of the accident differed in every major detail (red light/green light; moving traffic/stopped traffic; etc.), it was apparent that however it happened, they were both at fault. I leaned towards cutting the defendant more slack than the plaintiff, however, seeing as how the defendant was not expecting his bad driving to be rewarded with a large sum of money.

To be honest, the plaintiff's lawyer began to lose me about two minutes into his opening speech, when he went on and on about how the plaintiff's daughter had had the summer before her freshman year of high school--that precious precious time--and her ability to participate in important high school activities (I was guessing cheerleading; turned out to be basketball) ruined by her 'foot injury'. My thought = deal. I also didn't buy the whole line that she and her dad's summer together was ruined because they could no longer spend quality time together. Even if they were injured to where it hurt to go out (and it isn't like she was even ever on crutches or anything), whatever happened to good old sitting around and talking? Why do cars and baseball games have to be involved in parent-child bonding?

My especial favorite part was when the defendant's lawyer used the evidence photos during his summation to illustrate that according to the damage on the cars, the angle of impact would have had to match up with the defendant's version of the story (that true), and then the plaintiff's lawyer used part of his rebuttal to go on and on about how he didn't want to live in the defendant lawyer's world where people's injuries are overlooked and ignored. As opposed to the plaintiff lawyer's world, I suppose, where the laws of physics are overlooked and ignored.

I was a total superstar in the jury room. Most of us were scoffing at the whole 'reward my pain and suffering' angle already, and none of us thought the plaintiff was innocent of guilt in the accident, but this one juror (who was so obsessed with being the perfect juror that she took copious and detailed notes of everything anyone said, complete with diagrams of how she pictured the accident scene) got off on this tangent about how the defendant was trying to make an illegal left turn, and how she felt he should be punished for this. She and the two people she momentarily swayed to her side were not saying the plaintiff should get all the money he was asking for, but they were leaning towards finding in his favor and then giving him a couple hundred dollars for his doctor's bills (the initial visit, not the ninety magentic treatments after that).

My thought being, if he hadn't hired a lawyer in the first place, well...there's a reasonable amount of money to cover his initial doctor's visit right there. Plus, we weren't there to rule on suppositions about illegal turns that hadn't been brought up in court. We were supposed to decide if the defendant had been negligent and failed to yield, and he hadn't. I pointed this out loudly, and then we all shouted down the lady when she tried to convince us that the judge had mentioned this alleged illegal turn in his final directions to us (no, Fabricated Memory Lady, he mentioned that yielding was the law). We got back on track after that, so that was my little contribution to truth and justice for this year.

In retrospect, I would have been very pissed had we awarded the plaintiff even a small amount of money, because we discovered when we reentered the room that he hadn't even stuck around to hear the verdict. Apparently he thought his case was as crappy as we did. Swotty McPerfectJuror did an "ooh! ooh!" waving arm thing when the judge asked us if we had any questions after we gave our verdict (which you could tell he agreed with; I think he was irritated by the plaintiff's whole side; he had to keep coaching the plaintiff's lawyer how to do things like enter evidence correctly). Then, when called on, she made it a point to lecture the defendant about how badly he drove, and how some of us had almost not found in his favor.

Then the judge said that there was no law against turning left at this spot. HA!

One other funny part was when the defendant's lawyer was showing the defendant pictures of the accident site as they were telling their story, and the fourth picture turned out to be of this totally unrelated parking lot exit. The lawyer was like, "Well, I guess we won't admit that one then."

Ladies and gentleman, your tax dollars at work.