Jury Duty – the alternates

After selecting the twelve members of the jury the lawyers had to select four more jurors to serve as alternates. The alternates are not involved in the deliberation, but other then that they are treated the same as every other member of the jury. Before deliberation they are in the same room as the other jurors, and they are kept during the deliberation (in another room). They sit in the jury box. They get lunch at the same time as the rest of the jury.

Yet from the very beginning they were treated different by the ‘real’ jurors. They sat together in the juror room. Similar to a high-school lunch room, they had been forced into a clique. When jurors talked it was pretty casual, but I felt that the conversations people had with the alternates were always a bit more formal. They were being kept at an arm’s length.

I thought maybe it was in my head, but one day at a lunch I asked a fellow juror how they felt about the alternates and they told me “They feel separate from us”

In one case I was glad the alternates were not jurors. The first alternate showed herself to be stubborn and opinionated and unwilling to listen early on. She talked about how she wanted to have her first kid before she was 28, because if you are any older you can’t raise your kids correctly. Some of the jurors took offense to this, since they were older then then 28 when they had kids. She tried to make it sound nice by commenting that it was how she felt, but then she would say things like “Kids with older parents ALWAYS spend less time with their parents.” or “it’s bad for the kids if you are too old.” She claimed any older then 28 you can’t play with your kids when they are young because you are too old. I am not sure what out of shape 30 year old she is using as her standard but I don’t think age is the issue. She also felt bad for her friends who had moms that wouldn’t go clubbing with their daughters. I didn’t realize clubbing was a mother/daughter affair.

She always had to go the bathroom. Every 30 minutes. I am not exaggerating because every time we sat in the court room she would have to signal the court office for a bathroom break. She would be bending over in pain from her full bladder. She would get mad at the rest of us who used the bathroom because she always had to signal the officer. We tried to explain to her that while we ‘could’ go to the bathroom, we didn’t ‘need’ to yet. She seemed to think we were setting her up to make her look bad. Then she would drink 2 bottles of water citing the studies that say you need to have at least 8 bottles of water a day. The fact that she was peeing all day and couldn’t hold it didn’t seem to help our argument that she was probably pretty well hydrated. Even the court officer in charge of us who never said one negative thing (no matter how much we pestered him) commented one day under his breath “I have never seen anyone go the bathroom that much”.

One day she was talking about vacations and I overheard this conversation:
“You can’t go away and spend less then $500 a day”
“yes you can.”
“No. You can’t. I generally have to spend more then $500 a day.”
“Doesn’t it depend on what you do while on vacation?”
“It’s not a vacation if you aren’t spending money.”
“(sigh) Okay.”

I can’t imagine trying to have an intelligent debate with her about the case.