For the past week I've sat in on a civil court case so boring you will never read about it in a newspaper.
The attorneys were shoddy, the witnesses were all lying, and even the court reporter looked like she was ready to explode. The defendant no longer owns the property. The alleged accident took place six years ago.
This is jury duty.
I received a summons in the mail over a month ago.
Dozens of us were shuffled into empty courtrooms. The lights were switched off. Three TVs began to broadcast the history of trials in the "old times" of England.
"These were the days before juries were invented…"
A group of actors dressed in sacks, threw a man into the water. His arms and legs were bound. If he floated, he was obviously guilty. If he sank he was innocent.
He sank. Then his friends pulled him out of the water and everyone started dancing.
Ed Bradley from 60 Minutes appeared on camera and began to explain what jury duty is, and how it's a privilege for citizens of a democracy to participate in the justice system.
It is also their duty, and they are fined up to $1000 if they don't.
Lights were switched on, and a sorting process began.
Convicted felons do not have to serve. Mothers with small children do not have to serve. A Chinese translator stepped up and said people who don’t speak English do not have to serve.
Everyone else was sent to the juror's lounge, where there were computers, wireless internet, TVs hanging from the walls, and at least three vending machines.
More than a hundred people sat and waited for their names to be called out.
Mine was called quickly, and I was herded with 20 other people over to another building where two fidgety attorneys met us. They wanted to know if we were renters or homeowners, and whether there was any reason we couldn't serve.
One guy had "deep philosophical differences". Another said he would always find the tenant guilty.
Eight of us were selected. They chose everyone young and everyone Hispanic. And they got rid of all the homeowners.
Juries in Brooklyn must be a lot more interesting than in a lot of other places. A random sample of the population is so diverse that conversation in the jury room is never boring.
In our little group we had a housewife who owns a cat named Lollipop, a Puerto Rican-Guyanese doorman, a Puerto Rican subway conductor, a Dominican sales representative, an engineer with the Federal Aviation Administration, an African American doctor, and a waiter from Massachusetts who studied international relations in Amsterdam. And me.
OK, maybe it was a little boring.
The days kept getting longer, and the case dragged on over a week. The attorneys seemed to be making things up as they went along, and the witnesses were so incoherent and self-contradicting, that even they themselves didn't know what they were saying.
"Please remember this case is important to Mr. Rodriguez," said his attorney. And we did feel sorry for him. He was 60 but looked 80 and claimed that his living room ceiling had fallen on his head in 2001. "I turned around, and it fell on my head," he said.
But even the ambulance report said he wasn't seriously hurt.
Pictures were submitted in evidence, but no one could agree on what date they were taken or even what rooms they depicted. All we could see was an apartment in need of repair.
The landlord and her handyman Steve disagreed on the size of the hole that was left in the ceiling. "It was much smaller", they said. "He must have poked it with a broom".
Testimony indicated holes in the ceiling, rats in the kitchen, and plumbing that was allowed to deteriorate until it brought down the bathroom ceiling (and maybe others).
Rent was $500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn – about one third of the going rate, but that’s no excuse to have tenants living in squalor.
We found the landlord guilty, although from what she told us, she seemed to be living under exactly the same conditions in a building across the street.
The whole experience was surreal. We were complete strangers with no legal expertise, torn from our everyday lives to consider the situation of some very unfortunate people.
If we had thrown the landlady in the water, she would definitely have sunk. But the law says landlords must keep apartments habitable if they are renting them out.
The mood in the jury room was serious as we deliberated. We discussed each point carefully before moving on. It may not be a perfect system, but it was deeply democratic and even empowering at the basic level of citizenship.
It would simply have been nicer if it were over quicker.
