Jury duty

Today I reported for jury duty in the city of Camden, New Jersey: the murder capital of the United States of America.

Jury duty meant sitting on a dungeon with 300 others, watching news bulletins about a baby who is 3 dead bodies away from being king, and reading the Odyssey, the version that had been translated from the Greek by TE Lawrence, who was Lawrence of Arabia. Who read the book in Greek while hanging about in the desert.

Before today, I had believed that Odysseus was a disciplined hero, doing everything he could to get back to his wife Penelope. I learned today that while Penelope was fending off thieves, Odysseus was busy having farewell-sex with the goddess Calypso. For 7 years it was just sex because he was there. But that last night, phew! All night. And it was so good she gave him axes and robes and food and wine.

Hmph. So heroes have been lying about sex for at least 2,700 years! "Honey, she is a goddess, there is nothing I could do."

He managed to escape from the clutches of Calypso, a gorgeous goddess who adored him and provided for his every need in Paradise, only when another goddess Athena, helped him. Those goddesses!

But I digress. Jury duty on the day when the baby, born to be better than us, makes his entry.

The letter in the mail a month ago demanded I show up at Camden County Hall of Justice at 8.15am.

I am far more familiar with this building than I want to be: courtesy of 2 deep-pocketed and vengeful ex-husbands who dragged me into court once or twice a year from 1986 until 1999, and did their best to remove my 4 children from me and get me deported back to England. I didn’t want to live in England, how could I have known that today the line of succession of the monarchy has been assured to the 3rd generation?

The big-screen television in one room was showing soap operas, in the other, headline news.

Well, from my observation, that is exactly who we do not have on the juries. A case in point: the profiling child-murderer George Zimmerman, whose jury was 6 women who were judged qualified for his jury by legal professionals because they were stupid and did not have opinions about anything.

When the video ended we were told to stay within earshot because if we scarpered, we would be hauled up against a judge, fined 500 dollars, and made to serve 6 days jury duty. So suddenly jury duty becomes a punishment? That is not in the constitution. Is jury duty used as punishment for anything else upstanding citizens do? Gosh.

At noon, nothing had happened, not a single juror had been called, so we were told to roam around the wilds of Camden for an hour and get lunch. I walked past the boarded-up free public library, towards the Quaker Monthly Meeting of which I am a member, and thought about the inefficiencies and expense of hauling in 300 people to hang out in a dungeon for 4 hours.

Camden is the murder capital of the United States; more humans are killed in Camden per population than anywhere else. I guess the killers are not being caught. I spoke with other jurors, they told me that they had been called for jury duty, and as happened today, no-one was called to serve on a jury.

At 1pm we all reassembled, and at 2.30pm we were told to leave, and told that we could wait breathlessly by our mailboxes for our 5 dollar checks.

And I got back to reading about how Helen of Troy was so desired by her husband King Menelaus that when she didn’t produce a son, he knocked his heir out of a concubine.

So much for having the face that launched 1,000 ships. So much for jury duty. Welcome to the world, the new prince of England!