Grand Jury Duty

It's been a long week and I'm still not caught up with everything I need to do after being without power for four days.  I'm not going to complain because I know a lot of people are still without power and we were fortunate enough to have a generator and propane heater!  The sound of generators has been replaced with the sound of chainsaws, for those who have to deal with downed trees and limbs.

We still had to go to court today!  Luckily, it was a very short session.

As we were just getting started, my table started to vibrate.  I tried to ignore it, no one else's table was vibrating, just mine!  Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and asked, why is my table vibrating?  LOLOLOL!  Here the assistant had left her cell phone at the end of my table and she was getting a phone call.  I didn't know a vibrating cell could move things that much.

We were introduced to a new case.  This one with a new DA, Christine.  She was the one that was with us the day of jury selection and is a super nice and very funny lady!  I look forward to seeing more of her.  We were basically just introduced to the new case and didn't hear too much of it since they are in the early stages of collecting evidence.  We had a witness to hear but briefly and she kept going back and forth from Sargent to corporal in rank with the poor policeman and she finally said she keeps demoting and promoting the man so she's just going to call him Protector of the Universe from now on.  LOL!  She also forgot to swear him in, so when she did swear him in, she asked him if he's been telling the truth or he's just going to start telling the truth now that he's sworn in.  :o)  She's a hoot.

We had a witness from another case come in but he was so rude and obnoxious and decided he wasn't going to answer any questions, he pled the 5th. and after asking him if he was going to plead the 5th. for anything asked of him and his reply was yes, they dismissed him.  At this point, an entire review of his part of the case was made and the jury decided it was time to submit it to court.  In other words, an arrest warranty will be taken out for his arrest and now it is in the hands of the courts to decide if he's guilty or not.  We might, in the future, hear about other participants in this case but for now, that case is off our schedule.

The third case we are hearing now was put on hold for this session, so we got to go home!  It was a short one, for sure.  I fear that means the next session will be very long in order to get caught up on things!

It was interesting, got to have a few conversations with a detective while we were in breaks.  I found out there's an underground system in place to bring prisoners from the prison to the courthouse.  Why was I interested in this?  Because I feared running into a shackled prisoner that just gave testimony, while I was waiting for a ride home!  And I wondered why the detectives were wearing tiny little bright green tags on their suits today.  Why did this interest me?  Because I'm nosy.  The reason is, it shows they are carrying firearms.  Now, isn't that interesting?  He, also, said years ago, the bad guys caught onto this and were copying the tags and walking right into the courthouse with weapons and that they used to wear a certain color shirt to show it, too but that caught on and the bad guys were walking the streets with the same color shirts and other people could tell they were carrying weapons!  sigh.  I lead such a sheltered life!