Nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, and that jury duty sucks.
So many of us have been through it, you get that notice in the mail and wonder if you can just pretend you didn’t see it. Maybe you’re the sort of person who is just able to travel for a month or two and didn’t keep up with your snail mail? No, you’re not that interesting, and anyway, jury duty does mean you can have an excuse not to go to work.
Oh, and also you’re a good upstanding citizen who respects the law and the values on which this country was founded—and you want to do your part!
ADVERTISEMENT
Those had to be among the thoughts of at least some of the dutiful New Yorkers who arrived to the courthouse this week, jury summons in hand, only to find they were stepping into the Trial Of The Century (Yes, it’s still quite early in the century, but FFS, an ex-president is on trial for felonies. It’ll have to end up being a pretty messed-up century to top that.)
Still, those jurors showed up and answered the personal questions that were posed to them by the prosecutors and defense lawyers about their social media history, their jobs, their friends, and their opinions on their own ability to be impartial about the yellow-hued (it seems even oranges can lose some of their color during winter!) former President Donald Trump.
They sat, fully aware of the weight of serving on this jury.
The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president isn’t going to be quick. While that might be good news for Trump, who will have some time to catch up on his sleep, jury members have to contend with the thought that they’ll be leaving their own lives for quite a bit of time.
What’s more, there’s going to be a lot of “future of the country depends on” rhetoric swirling around a trial like this—from people who hope to see the former president found guilty, people who hope to see him vindicated, and people who think JFK Jr. is going to suddenly Alien his way out of the judge’s stomach. Jurors are going to be dealing with a lot.
Though they probably knew this would be the case during and after the trial, they might not have expected it would start the moment they walked in the courtroom for jury selection. But it did!
Media outlets have been offering a constant flow of details about potential jurors, apparently forgetting that the internet is a thing we all have in our pockets all the time.
As hard as it might be to find 12 people in the entirety of Manhattan with the ability to be impartial about a man who has devoted his life to the idea that all attention is good attention, it’s proving even harder—now that jurors are finding out the press has no compunctions about sharing easily identifiable details of their lives.
Of course, that’s fine, right? It’s not like MAGA superfans—who didn’t need much more than a nod from Trump to raid their makeup drawers and try to violently overthrow the government—have figured out who you are, where you live, and what you do?
A seated juror was dismissed on Thursday after she said she no longer thought she could be impartial now that “aspects of my identity have already been out there in public. Yesterday alone, I had friends and family push things to me,” she told the court.
Maybe that’s because she was specifically targeted by Trump superfan Jesse Waters on his Fox News show the night before. With alternates still to be chosen, jury selection is still going to take some time.
But if you live in Manhattan and get that jury summons, don’t worry! Just show up, stare down the miserable face of the man who could once again be the leader of the free world, understand that information about your personal life will be blasted out across the biggest news outlets in the world, sleep securely knowing that entire reddit pages will be created to dissect every possible detail of your past, and do your patriotic duty!
Oh yeah, and you’ll also get $40 per day, enjoy!
