Jury Duty

NOTE: This article was supposed to have something to do with Shadowrun but, during the writing process, something went horribly wrong and it ended up being 5% Shadowrun, and 85% babble. (The remaining 10% represents the breaks between letters and paragraphs). I hope you enjoy it anyway, although I have to warn all members of the male gender that viewing this document may result in the life long desire to wear a protective groin cup.

You’d think with all of the murders and the robberies and the drugs and the politicians stealing money from orphanages they’d be able to find something better for me than a dick case.

Perhaps a little background is needed here. A few weeks ago I received an ominous jury summons, marked repeatedly with statements such as “severe penalties if you don’t show up”, “be there or we’ll blow up your house” and “upon pain of death”, indicating that it would be in my best interest to shuffle into a crowded room inside Philadelphia’s Justice Building at the ridiculously early hour of 8:15 AM on Monday, March 13th. So, as a dedicated American who respects my wacked out legal system and who didn’t want several burly men to drag me to a small room and hit me repeatedly in the testicles with a ball-peen hammer, I pulled myself out of bed very early last Monday and placed myself in the hands of the Philadelphia courts system, a system that deemed me qualified to decide the fate of a fellow human being even though I routinely engage in activities such as building rail guns out of ball point pens and drinking cheap box-o-wine through my nose.

After setting off the courthouse metal detector several times with my Talisman For Safety In Travel, I entered a large room packed with around 300 individuals of diverse ethnic and economic background, perhaps the most diverse group of people I’ve ever seen gathered in one place who weren’t shooting or throwing rocks at each other. I crammed my butt into a seat between a large, odorous individual and another large, odorous individual, listened as a video tape played in the background that explained, in great detail, how to fill in the “Name” part of your jury questionnaire, and quickly checked off various questions on my own survey sheet. Most were pretty easy, as in “Have you, or any of your family, ever witnessed or been a victim of a crime?”. Me? My family? Noooooo, NEVER! You see, we live in this little box, only popping out from time to time to go to the bathroom.

But one question in the Civil section of the sheet (i.e. the “I’m suing you because you stepped on my toe.” section) stopped me. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it went something like: “Would you have difficulty following the court’s instructions to award money for things like mental suffering and anguish, even though it is difficult to place a dollar sum on such damages?”. At first I checked “Yes”, because I follow a modified “eye for an eye” philosophy and feel that if somebody, say, tripped you and caused mental suffering and anguish in the form of a cracked collarbone you should be able to take a mallet to the upper body of the person who delivered the damage, thus making them think twice before they pull a little prank like that again. Then I changed my answer to “No” because, well, if it’s the court’s instructions I don’t really have much of a choice. But, then I changed it back to “Yes” again because I felt that, if the money damages sought for a particular case were too high or too low it may affect the way I judge the case. Basically, I’d feel that the plaintiff was either being a jerk or a wuss and I don’t think I’d be able to shake that impression from my mind.

After changing the answer a few more times I finally decided the hell with it and left a nice, confused blob of checks, x’s, and circles for the lawyers to decipher. Besides, I figured I’d probably have a better chance of getting on a Criminal case than Civil, in which case money damages didn’t really come into the picture.

I figured wrong. I entered a smaller group of 35 jury selectorians, was slapped with an obnoxious yellow Jury sticker designed to make me an easier target for Mafia hitmen, corralled into a “secret” elevator and launched to the 8th floor of the Justice Building. Soon I, and my fellow jury journeyers, were sitting before a pair of lawyers, one very high powered and well dressed who was working for the defendants, a large hospital; and another who looked like he had been hired off of UHF television and gone to the Earl’s School of Law and Horticulture. After a very extended duration of nothingness, during which I was read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles in its entirety, the lawyers stopped looking us over like we were fresh supermarket turkeys and began their little exam to see which of us would be discarded and who would have the honor of residing—for a week and a half—over a case involving the negligent amputation of a penis.

Of course they didn’t tell us straight out that the case was about the loss of a popular masculine organ as this would have caused every male in our group to bolt from the room. They just gave us little hints in the form of questions like: “Have you, or any members of your family, ever experienced urinary difficulties, skin cancer of the genitalia, or the loss or amputation of the penis?”

As it turned out, questions like these (and there were many) were one of the keys to me getting out of jury duty. You see, I still have a rather adolescent attitude when it comes to discussion of the male reproductive organs so, as the rest of the room remained dead silent following each penile inquiry, a muffled but distinct chortle of suppressed laughter would emanate from my region of the room every time the word “penis” was mentioned.

Upon completion of this series of questions, and following a short lunch break at the 12th Street Diner during which I ate the worst hamburger ever created, we returned to the court room and were greeted with a final question. “Do any of you have any extreme hardships that would make it virtually impossible for you to sit on this jury?” My hand bolted up. I didn’t really have any idea at the time what excuse I was going to give them, but it was vaguely rooted in the fact that, since I worked as a Temp, I would be replaced if I was gone for a week and a half. (You see, not only do we not receive benefits or insurance, we’re also not protected under the “can’t fire you for jury duty laws” since we technically work for the temp agency, whether we’re actually working or not. As it turns out, my temp assignment was unceremoniously ended the next day anyway, so I kinda regret not getting on the jury since I’d at least be getting nine bucks a day as opposed to zero.)

After another long wait, during which I was able to re-read the Adobe Pagemaker manual, I was called into a small back room where the two lawyers sat me down and asked me what my excuse was. I rambled out my temp excuse, which didn’t seem to be impressing anybody. But then the defense lawyer—who probably screwed himself out of the best juror he could ever possibly want—asked me why, in my original questionnaire, I had had such difficulty with the “money for suffering question”. I told him that I followed a modified eye for an eye philosophy, adding “or, in this case, a penis for a penis”. The hospital lawyer laughed. The UHF lawyer didn’t seem to get the joke. The hospital lawyer then asked why I had cracked a smile every time the word “penis” was mentioned. I went into a long speech about how I can’t really take things seriously if they involve phalli, and could tell that the UHF lawyer wasn’t especially pleased with the idea of having someone on the jury who couldn’t take his case seriously. It would be kind of demoralizing to your case if a member of the jury broke into laughter every time you tried to make a point. I was about to make the “Guess you won’t have to worry about a hung jury, eh?” joke I’d been saving when I was released back to the courtroom and sat around for another extended duration of time, during which I was able to read the Macromedia Fontographer manual. Twice.

Needless to say, I didn’t get on the jury and the justice system is safe from me for at least a year. I know, I know: “What the hell does any of this have to do with Shadowrun?”. Nothing, really. I just wanted to tell a story.

But I do have a few ideas regarding Shadowrunners and the legal system of 2060. Here’s a few ideas on how runners can get involved in the legal process:

Bodyguards

Judges, lawyers, juries, and witnesses are in constant danger of getting whacked for their involvement in a particular case. While it’s kind of assumed that people like criminal judges would probably have full time bodyguards by 2060, other individuals such as jury members and lawyers may need temporary protection for the duration of a case, and perhaps even a little follow-up afterwards if the defendants are really pissed off.

Threat Aversion

Think of Threat Aversion runs as pre-bodyguarding. Basically, the runners are charged with tracking down possible threats to legal participants and neutralizing them before they can adversely affect the case. The runners would have to find out who might want to wipe out a jury or judge, figure out whether there are any contracts out against those they are charged to protect, and just generally make sure the actual bodyguards will have less to bodyguard against. The tricky part of threat aversion is that the actions of the runners can’t alter the case, thus making their job rather difficult if they discover that the individual slated to assassinate a judge is an actual defendant in the case. The runners wouldn’t be able to knock him out since the action would be indistinguishable from an actual hit against the defendant. So the runners may just have to prevent him from getting to his target or use some other creative tactic to make sure the assassination doesn’t take place.

Purity Control

Maintaining the purity of a witness or jury member involves making sure that their attitudes and opinions are not affected by outside sources, be they the media, friends or large members of the Mafia equipped with electrodes, a high output battery, and a full set of dental tools. So the runner has to protect them from threats and influences, often from an undercover position in order to prevent the fact that they’re being protected from options from affecting their opinions. While most witnesses and jury members remain in safehouses during the duration of a trial, it is still possible that a witness may roam “free” if they had the necessary connections to get themselves out of lockdown.

Finally, any of the above options can be reversed, thus generating runs in which the runners must adversely affect a witness’s purity, assassinate judges, or organize a third party hit. Perhaps they’ll even gain new respect for the advantages of being SINless: No jury duty.

Branson Hagerty (bhagerty@thunder.temple.edu)