Jury Duty? Really?

I have to start checking to see if I have to go in for jury duty. I'm scheduled to be on call this coming week.

I don't want to do it.

Now, it's not that I begrudge a civic duty. If they wanted me to, I'd direct traffic or file papers or do something like that. And it's only partly that my partner's Ex-Wife works at the courthouse. But, I mean, really. . . you want me to help decide someone's fate? I don't want to. I'd gladly sit in the court all day for a week, it's just the responsibility of it that I don't want.

Part of it is that I couldn't, in good conscience, recommend that anyone be sentenced to waste in our prison system, whether or not they're guilty of whatever crime, so I'm not going to be able to take the weigh-only-the-facts oath. I am, in fact, a budding prison abolitionist.

Do you think that if I tell them that they'll let me go? Will I have a chance to tell them that?

I'm hoping they'll just dismiss me without cause. I'm 24*, I'm very visibly a total hippie, I've got a nice fat summa cum laude degree, and I'm a secretary for a Fucking Non-Profit™. I'm signed up for newsletters from Unmarried.org, the Human Rights Campaign, the Organic Consumers Association, the Arbor Day Foundation, and the National Home Gardening Club. I've gone to protests, signed petitions, and go to union meetings for fun. This afternoon it's going to be writing-my-state-representatives-time, to try to encourage them in this whole moratorium-on-the-death-sentence thing.

One side or the other is going to consider me a liability, you know?

Here's hoping.

LOVE

EDIT: Called in, and I am off the hook! But you all knew that.


*In five days. Happy birthday to me. . .