CALL ME SNAKE

I spent a day at the Cambridge Courthouse earlier this week fulfilling my civic duty as a potential juror, though I was never empaneled. A group of about 70 would-be jurors filed into the District Courtroom, 12 of whom were ultimately picked to weigh in on a dispute between neighbors. The attorneys used peremptory challenges four times, giving four people temporarily seated in the jury box the heave-ho. Unlike on TV, the attorneys did not question the prospective jurors before sending them packing, which made me wonder why they were booted off. The best I could come up with was that the people unseated tended to be younger or less prosperous looking–i.e., people who probably did not own land and might therefore be less sympathetic to the plight of a landowner who felt slighted. But we’ll never know. The judge told them not to take it “personally,” and none of them seemed bent out of shape in the slightest. In fact, they appeared to be relieved, as did most of the people parading out of the Courtroom–minus the 12 who’d walked in with us an hour or so before.