An interesting day

Today I headed down to the Logan County Courthouse again. This time to possibly be a juror on a case. I got there at about 8:30 a.m. and sat and waited....one thing I have learned about the court is that everything moves VERY slow. And when they say they are going to start at 9:00 it dosen't usually start until 9:30. :) So FINALLY the Judge came in and got things going. First he told us a little bit about the case, some guy actually an inmate of the Jail there had been accused of assaulting the detention officer, if he was proved guilty the sentence would be incarceration. Which in my language is imprisonment. :) So it was quite serious. After he explained that to us the Judges secretary started rolling the little "wheel thing" (sorry I don't know what it's called) and drawing names. She named off 3 and then mine was the fourth one! So I went up and sat in the Jury box. After they had drawn 12 names the Judge then proceeded to ask us some questions, and had us take an oath to answer all questions that were put to us truthfully. Then everybody had to stand up and tell their name, where they were from, where they worked, if they were married, and if they had children. When it came my turn I will admit that I was REALLY nervous, I told them that I lived in Coyle with my parents, that I worked at home on the farm, and of course was not married. After that the prosecuting Lawyer got up and started asking us questions. Some were just general, like he asked me if things were going slow on the farm, I said at the moment yes, but it was about to start picking up really quickly when the goats started having kids. So then he started asking about the goats. :) How many I had, and what I did with them. Seemed like he stayed on me for quite some time. The questioning took all morning and some of the questions were really hard, things like "what do you expected the accused to act like when he gets on the witness stand." If you were the accused would you want you to be on the Jury, and lots of questions asking if we had anybody close to us that had ever commited crimes and stuff. After a while, we had a 15 minute break and the 12 of us went up stairs to the Jury room, I'm not sure why, we didn't do anything except use the restroom, and some folks drank coffee. The stairs were really interesting, the ceiling was so low at one point, that you had to duck way down to avoid whacking your head. After we came back down there was more questioning from the defending lawyer. FINALLY we had a break for lunch, Elijah came and picked me up and we came home for a quick lunch. Went back at 1:30, and then it was time for the Lawyers to excuse some of the Jury if they wished and pick different ones. About 3 people got excused and each time a new person came they would have to ask a bunch of questions again. And then the defending Lawyer excused me. :( Oh well, it was still a pretty fun experience, and maybe sometime in the next two months I'll get to actually be on a case, we'll see.

~Bethany