As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have jury duty starting today. I’ll post periodically throughout the day if anything interesting happens — hopefully without saying anything that will get me arrested.
Thankfully I’m in the New York County criminal court section, so I might get an interesting case, not the lame civil court section.
Things got off to an inauspicious start this morning. As promised, I printed up a stack of juror rights brochures from the Fully Informed Jury Association and discreetly left them on a table with official court literature in the waiting room. Twenty minutes later, a court officer noticed the brochures and confiscated them. Oh well.
Interesting that they mentioned New York’s famous John Peter Zenger trial in the juror orientation video. The narrator (the late Ed Bradley, I think) mentioned that the jury was ordered to find Zenger guilty but refused. Odd that they’ll mention that,  but they won’t connect the dots to inform jurors they have the long-standing right and duty to judge the law itself, as well as the facts of the case, regardless of any judge’s instructions to the contrary.