I showed up at 8:20, ten minutes early, and was the only juror that had arrived (out of the approximately seventy-five that would eventually appear). I proceeded to choose a chair, slouch down, and sleep for an hour before they started calling names. Fortunately for myself, I have no trouble whatsoever sleeping in public. The chairs weren’t particularly comfortable, but did I mention it was 8:30am? It was. I awoke briefly to watch a portion of a video where they told us how exciting and important it is to be a juror. It’s like someone got paid to market something that isn’t for sale. Hey videographer, didn’t anyone tell you we aren’t allowed to leave? You really don’t need to try so hard. Also, I strongly suspect that the parade of enthusiastic people with the title “Former Juror” wasn’t a representative sample. Where were all the people saying “yeah, it was pretty boring, but at least it got me out of work”?

When we got up to the courtroom, we were told that we’d be sitting in on a misdemeanor DUI case. The (very nice) judge spent a lot of time telling us about, you know, how awesome America is and how our jury trials rock the party like no other. Or something. It was sort of like a less endearing, more patriotic version of the previously mentioned video. The she started drawing names for potential jurors. She called 16, from which the goal (it later became clear) was to winnow it to 12 jurors and 2 alternates. While initially entertaining, my enthusiasm took a sharp turn off a cliff when I realized I’d be listening to jurors get questioned for the next four hours.

They asked the questions you’d expect. What neighborhood do you live in? What do the other adults in your household do for work? Have you been on a jury before? Do you hate Mexicans? That last one was implied, not asked outright. For the most part, the answers went about as you’d expect too: most people answered fairly directly and some people took the time to overshare about tangentially related things. A certain class of people did their best to prove themselves unqualified by claiming they were hopelessly biased. Most of these people were pretty unconvincing and transparent. No one had the balls to openly claim they hated Mexicans, but several people tried to claim they didn’t trust cops (ever!), didn’t trust people who drank, and one person claimed that DUI laws were unfair. The judge set the vast majority of them straight under repeated questioning. “So, even though you don’t think people should have a single drink if they’re going to drive, that’s not the law, and you don’t think you could apply the law in this case, even if you don’t agree with it?” They pretty much all relented under pressure from the judge.

After about an hour of jury questioning, the judge casually mentioned that the case was likely to go through Monday. Two potential jurors who were currently being questioned excused themselves saying they couldn’t be gone from work that long. Now I had a dilemma. I am going to DC for work on Monday. If I told the judge that, I’d have to reschedule my service within the next ninety days. But I’d already invested two hours into this exciting day. Should I admit my schedule conflict, go home, and come back some other day, once again at eight-freaking-thirty? Or should I wait it out, hope I don’t get picked, and be free from jury duty for a period of at least one year? If I got called up to be questioned, I’d be obligated to go home at that point. But by the time that happened, it could already be 1:30 or later, and then I would’ve have wasted a full five hours. (This ended up happening to one poor women.) In the end, my wait-and-see strategy prevailed and I got to go home without consequence.

I guess the most surprising thing to me is how much time these trials take. This was just a misdemeanor DUI case, and we spent five hours just selecting a jury! Then there were still three days of trial to go (those poor schmucks are still sitting in that courtroom as I type this). The Bill of Rights guarantees your right to a speedy trial, but that only applies to the time between arrest and the trial. Once the trial starts, all bets are off, it seems.

In other news, I got another summons to court. Weak.

I got to court at 9am, just like my subpoena instructed. Far from the dignified chambers I had expected, the room featured squeaky wooden chairs and a judge’s bench that rose a mere two feet from the ground.  The judge’s post, as well as the tables for the attorneys, seemed to be cheap faux-birch particle board. I dug in and watched the buzz of the lawyers, trying to determine their relative amounts of smarminess based upon their suit choices. Court finally got rolling around 10am. I spent the next hour scribbling down legal terms so that I could look them up later (e.g. I’m pretty sure that “OR is denied” means “the defendant will not be released on her own recognizance”). Finally around 11am, the District Attorney in my case strolled in. I can’t explain why, but I took some bizarre pride in noting that he looked especially un-smarmy, even more so after meeting with him. He pulled me out of the court and explained that he didn’t normally deal with petty stuff like tagging (”me either!”, I wanted to protest), but spent most of his time working on domestic violence cases. He said the kid in my case had a domestic violence conviction as well as a few convictions for dealing drugs. I’d had plenty of misgivings about testifying against a guy because he’d written a tiny tag on a parking lot wall, but the domestic violence conviction sucked out a lot of my sympathy for him. The attorney said he was going to offer the defendant a deal (which included jail time because he’d broken his parole so often), and that the kid would be stupid not to take it. Thirty minutes later I got the news that the deal was denied and that I was to come back at 1:30am for the hearing.

It turned out the day was as beautiful as the rest we’ve had recently and I got kinda sad about being stuck inside. Then I realized I would’ve been sitting inside working regardless, so maybe this two hour break was a blessing. Wandering around SoMa soaking up the sun, I was smiling like a man who’d just completed a monumental chore. I ate some pizza alfresco and sucked down a few mid-day gins. If I wasn’t going to be back at work, I figured I could at least make the most of it.

When court finally started again at 2:15pm (45 minutes late, did you catch that?), there were a few more arraignments to be worked through. “My” case came up last. The defendent, dressed in jailcell orange (love the orange Vans!), spent much of his waiting time in tears. The DA, who seemed to have spent some time with this guy, told me he always did that in court. Just as the hearing was about to start, the lawyers headed up to the bench for a last-minute meeting with the judge. It turns out the kid claimed he was “addicted to tagging”. Um. He got sent to behavioral court or something for an evaluation. If the court agrees that he’s, ahem, “addicted to tagging”, he’ll go through some special program and get treatment. If the court agrees that it’s a ridiculous last-ditch attempt to save his ass from jail, they’ll reconvene the hearing and he might get offered a new deal. If he doesn’t take that, I’ll probably have to go back to testify in a jury trial.

Update: Just for the record, I’m not actually gunning for this kid to go to jail. It’s not like I have any say in it anyway. I’m just some weird playing piece in a game that has nothing to do with me. I wasn’t, as Emily thought, angry about the fact that he might end up in treatment. It’s probably a better place for him. But it is a ridiculous last-ditch attempt to save his ass from jail, clearly. I’m just stating the facts, here!

The talk was about Curitiba, Brazil, which is apparently some urban planning mecca. Now, I’m certainly no professional urban planner, but I did take a few classes at school, and if I still had a myspace page I would probably list it in my interests, and I like to think that if I was at a party full of urban planners I could probably make well-intentioned uninformed comments that would only annoy them about 70%. (My conversation starter at such a party would go like this: “Oh, you’re an urban planner too? Cool. I know an urban planner in Minneapolis.” That’s assuming the party wasn’t in Minneapolis and Aaron wasn’t the one that invited me.) Anyway, the point of all this is that I have somehow never heard of Curitiba, Brazil. It sounds like an amazing place. Maybe he was overselling it, but it sounds like the kind of place that must be in every Urban Planning 101 textbook. Maybe I should read more Urban Planning 101 textbooks.

The professor talked about the incredible transformation that occurred in the city from the late 70s until the early 90s. In those fifteen years the city grew from about 650,000 people to 1.7 million people. But rather than all that growth turning the city into a sprawling mess, the city became even more livable as more people moved there. For example, the mayor set up a few bus-only roads which encouraged more people to take the bus which allowed him to set up even more bus-only roads, etc. Then he built special bus shelters that allow people to pay before the bus arrives, letting the buses achieve near-subway speeds without the expense of a subway. Which encouraged more people to ride, paying for further improvements, and so on.

My favorite story was about the time they tried to close one of the major streets to automobiles on weekends. Apparently the retailers on that street were furious and declared that they would drive on the street regardless. So the mayor rolled out a long, long sheet of paper down the entire length of the street and promised free paint to any child who wanted to come sit in the street and make some art, a tradition which continues every Saturday to this day.

Oh, also, they had favelas in the city, but the mayor couldn’t really do anything about them because class warfare was so en vogue at the time, or something. (Did you hear that Obama is going to make class war illegal? Love that guy!) But what he did was go to the favela, pass out plastic bags, and offer free bus passes to everyone who brought a bag full of trash. The before-and-after pictures were stunning.

Oh! And he set up a special “24 hour” section of town. They built an “outdoor mall”-style building and would only rent to people who agreed to keep their shops open 23 hours a day. The mayor reportedly joked about how that’s become the main area of town where students gather to conspire against him.

After the talk we ate salads that Kelly claimed were the size of her head but which were actually the size of two of her heads, assuming she had two heads, which she doesn’t.

Update: and, hey! They picked up the SFist story on Mission Mission, another of my favorite blogs (where a quote of mine was also featured last week)!

Instead I flew off to hang out in foreign bars, dance clubs, and other dark places (and to repeat the phrase “I’m sorry; I only speak English” all day). There were dozens of events in SF in October that I was going to be sad to miss, but unlike most of them (shows, for the most part), this one would be around when I got back.

Or so I thought. Yesterday, I got the news that, in fact, Mission Street Food has already gotten too popular, with lines of people down the block before the cart even opens. So now, instead, he’s going to temporarily rent an as-yet-unknown restaurant for the night and serve food out of there instead. What? Then it’s just, you know, a restaurant! I demand kitsch and irony and the appeal of something new and different (and possibly offensive, if you’re one of those people who thinks a lot). Instead I get a restaurant that’s closed 6 nights a week? I suppose I’ll take what I can get. King Trumpet, wait for me, I’ll be home soon!