Jury duty

Yesterday, the mayor of Birmingham was convicted on numerous felony counts of various kinds of corruption.

It's big news in these parts.

The now ex-mayor is quite a character and highly entertaining. As a politician, he was an outspoken, hotheaded ball of undirected energy. Surprisingly, he actually accomplished some positive things for the city during his brief tenure as its mayor. But the man is also sadly and deeply flawed, and his nature caught up to him yesterday.

But I wasn't thinking about the mayor when news of his conviction broke. I was thinking about the jury and how quickly they did their job. They returned their verdicts on all 60 counts less than two hours after the judge completed his instructions.

I've served on one jury in my life. It was a criminal trial in New Orleans, and the case was as open and shut as it could possibly be.

The trial lasted less than half a day. It was a stinking hot Thursday in late August, and none of the jurors minded sitting through a trial. In fact, we were happy to be there. The late summer days make everyone in New Orleans lethargic, and sitting quietly indoors in the air conditioning while accomplishing something and hearing a good story wasn't a bad way to pass a few hours.

The defendant, a young man, was charged with being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. That is a crime. For reasons that were never made clear by either side, the young man was stopped by a police officer, and while the cop was talking to him, the gun fell through the leg of his baggy, underwear-showing thug britches and onto the ground. The gun, a cheap Saturday night special, was passed through the jury.

The prosecution proved that the guy was a felon and he was in possession of a gun, and the defense didn't dispute those two facts. Case closed.

The defense centered around a legal concept called "constructive possession", something the defendant's lawyer didn't even seem to understand, and it made zero impact on those of us in the jury.

The jury represented a true cross-section of the New Orleans population. We were black and white, male and female and all engaged in differing vocations. There was never a doubt about our ultimate decision, but as New Orleanians we had important business to conduct before getting to the minor matter of our verdict. When we were sent to the jury room to deliberate, each of us gave the others a brief (for New Orleans) autobiography, and then we played a few rounds of who-do-you-know. Living in a city with zero degrees of separation, this took a considerable amount of time. Since it was August, we also had to debate the Saints chances in the upcoming football season.

In New Orleans everything eventually becomes a party, and no party there is complete without good food. There was no way we were going to vote until we got fed something tasty. The bailiff eventually delivered a couple of big bags filled with delicious seafood po-boys and a bunch of cold soft drinks and we enjoyed them while solving most of the world's problems.

After finishing our sandwiches, we gently eased into a very brief discussion of the trial and quickly brought in the inevitable guilty verdict.

The Alabama jury that convicted the Birmingham mayor yesterday barely had time to take a potty break and choose a foreman before they came back into the courtroom with their verdict.

That wouldn't have, couldn't have happened in New Orleans. The food there is way too good and the natives are too talkative for a New Orleans jury to squander an opportunity to have a nice chat-and-chew with a group of strangers who hadn't already their life stories a hundred times. That would have been a grave miscarriage of justice.

Yesterday, those poor Alabama jurors just got down to business and went right home. How sad for them.

Technically, I still owe New Orleans another week of jury duty.

The trial I served on was held on the first Thursday of my two week term in the jury pool. No trials were scheduled for Friday, so I was off the next day. On Monday morning, when I was supposed to be back in the courthouse for my second week, I was instead sitting in my brother's living room in Birmingham, watching television coverage of Hurricane Katrina wrecking my city.