Doing My Civic Duty

For a little over a week, I more or less dropped off the face of the earth to do my civic duty as a juror on a trial.  When you have a driver’s license or register to vote, it’s not uncommon to get called in for a day of jury duty but most people never get selected for an actual jury.

When you go into the selection panel, they tell you what the trial is for and at that point many people will raise their hands to say flat out that they are opposed to being a juror.  They can’t force you against your will, so they let all these people go.  But I don’t like to lie, so I didn’t raise my hand here.  I wasn’t morally opposed; I just hoped they wouldn’t pick me.  (I’m very literal and tend to interpret statements exactly the way they’re worded.)  There were probably people answering yes to this question solely to get out of being chosen and not just because they were so morally opposed.  Then again, not many people would be able to sit through a child molestation trial.

APD Doesn’t Have to Make You a Second-Rate Citizen

Once the judge and attorneys get you alone, they ask you questions that could qualify or disqualify you.  I was open about my APD, thinking it might disqualify me.  The judge asked me to explain what it was, and she asked me some questions about it.

Actually I felt that the judge went above and beyond to accommodate me in the courtroom without singling me out, and she did it in a way that benefited the other jurors as well:

• She gave a talk about how some people have a great auditory memory for details and others need to write things down, and if we need anything repeated from the transcript we should raise our hand right away.
• At the point when she was giving us a detailed speech and needed us to focus, she told the observers in the courtroom they wouldn’t be allowed to enter or exit because the doors created too much background noise – something she and I had talked about at the beginning.
• She also prefaced the speech with a talk about how because she’d be reading from a book, we wouldn’t be able to see her lips and her expressions wouldn’t be animated, which would make it harder to make out what she was saying.

Something to Be Learned

You’re wondering about the details of the trial, aren’t you?  Let’s just say it was difficult and leave it at that.  It gave me the opportunity to see the different ways abuse affects victims into adulthood as well as the myths about abuse that persist in the general public to this day. I’ll address one that seemed to be common among the parents in the group because I think there’s a lot to be learned:

“My child would tell me everything that happens to him/her, so it’s not possible for a child to be abused and not tell an adult right away.”

It made me sad to see how much the parents wanted to believe they knew everything about their child, that no one could come between them.  The truth is that children hide all kinds of things from their parents, and it’s not hard for an abuser to intimidate a child into keeping their secret.