Today, I fulfilled one of my civic duties and reported for Massachusetts jury duty.
It wasn’t my most exciting day, but I did learn a few things. One, in 1860, Massachusetts became the first state to seat African Americans on a jury. Two, women did not become part of jury pools in MA until 1950. Also, the mass.gov page reminds that “Despite its late inclusion of women jurors, Massachusetts was the first state to institute the one day/one trial system statewide.” I learned all of this through a riveting jury pool room video, and after that it was a lot of sitting.
They did let us out for a lunch break, and I met a favorite person of mine at Spoodles – which is always nice. And for the first time, I didn’t order a sandwich with meat (almost 2 full weeks meat free and I think my Crohn’s likes it!).
I was brought with a group of jurors into a courtroom twice, but my juror number wasn’t called. Maybe I shouldn’t have written “I think our whole system sucks.” for the last question in part 3.
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