I’ve never served on any type of jury, including spending a recent month on call at the federal court in Topeka. The call never came.
The closest I ever came to being selected for jury duty occurred thirty-some years ago and is, I think, a sufficiently interesting episode that if I tell it to you now a great proportion of the readership may not fall asleep. It comes with a prologue that pre-dates my brush with jury service by about a decade.
Here is the prologue. In early November of 1979, when my wife and I were living on Moro Street, we went out one night and returned an hour later to discover that our house had been burglarized. The take included most of our electronics — TV, stereo — plus jewelry and anything else one might be able to pawn for cash. Also taken were our pillow cases, presumably handier to walk off with the jewelry.
Naturally we were distressed and naturally also we presumed the stuff was gone for good.
About two weeks later, there was a burglary and arson fire downtown, the fire having been set to cover the burglar’s tracks. It was a serious enough fire that it got front page coverage in The Mercury. Within a few days the RCPD had made an arrest.
A short time after that the police contacted us. In the process of going through the trailer where the suspect in the arson fire lived, they had found numerous items that seemed unlikely to be his. Were they ours? To our surprise, we got back a significant portion — although not all — of the loot that had been taken from our house a few weeks earlier.
The suspect — whose identity I knew from the news reports in The Mercury — was convicted of the arson fire and shipped off to prison. End of story, I thought.
Fast-forward a decade or so. I am now editor of The Mercury when a summons arrives to report for jury duty. I showed up in the courtroom of Judge Paul Miller at the appointed hour with about three dozen fellow citizens.
When all of us prospective jurors gathered in the courtroom, Miller began with a general presentation of the basics of the case. You who have been called know the drill. It included who the attorneys were, how the actual jurors would be selected, how long the case was expected to take. He also pointed out the defendant and the charges against him. That’s when I knew for sure I would be back at work at The Mercury by noon, or probably even sooner.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I’ll simply note that the defendant in that burglary trial was the same man who had burglarized our house close to a decade earlier.
At the close of his opening remarks, Miller asked whether any of us in the large pool believed we had a reason why we should be excused from service before the actual jury was selected. I raised my hand.
“Yes, Mr. Felber, why do you believe you should be excused?” Miller asked me. At that instant, I realized I held the power to screw up the entire trial process. All I had to do was tell the truth in front of all those prospective jurors and a mistrial would be summarily declared.
I also knew the judge would be pissed off at me …rightly, by the way. “Your Honor,” I replied, “I don’t think you want me to explain my reasons in public.”
The judge, who certainly knew what the other prospective jurors didn’t — namely the defendant’s track record — read me loud and clear.
“Mr. Felber, please step into my chambers.”
The attorneys and court clerk also entered while the rest of the room waited and wondered.
In the privacy of the chambers, I explained my family’s previous experience with the defendant, the recovery of the stuff, etc. The judge thanked me for not laying it all out in front of the jury pool. Then he motioned to the defense counsel. “Go back into the courtroom and ask your client whether this is true,” he instructed the attorney.
The defense counsel was gone four or five minutes before coming back in. “Well, counselor, what did he say?” Miller asked.
“He said it might have been; he didn’t keep records of his burglaries,” the attorney reported.
Judge Miller turned back to me. “You see that door over there, Mr. Felber?” He pointed to the door to the hallway, not the one back to the courtroom.
“Yes your honor.”
“This is what I want you to do. I want you to go out that door, leave the building and not come back until this trial is over.”
That’s what I did. I was back at work by 11.
