Dear Judge. Amanda could not come to Jury Duty, she was Sick. Signed, Amanda's Mom

So the catheter is in now, and it hurts. I feel certain I would be happier if the whole court thing had gone better.

Um. Right. I had to make an appearance before the chief judge at the D.C. Superior Court today to present proof that I had a good reason for skipping jury duty three times. That would be "because I had no idea I was going to be in a hospital all those days."

The appearance itself was no big deal. I went in with my doctor's note and the judge took a look at it for a second. He asked if this was a description of my current medical condition and declared me ineligible to serve on a jury. Actually getting to the right courtroom was several different kinds of hell at once.

First, I had to find the right courthouse. After looking in vain, I asked a police office out on Indiana Ave, who pointed me toward the Moultrie Building. I got through security with no problem, but the guy I asked for directions gave me fine directions, just for the wrong place. He took what seemed like a long time figuring out what I wanted. I wondered how much he was paid to wave the wand around at people.

Once there, I waited for a lawyer to file some papers, and then for a detective to certify some deaf witnesses. The chyk behind the counter was not particularly smart, and the detective's command of ASL was shaky. She had to grab a piece of paper out of a trash can so she could write out "How much was your Metro fare?" I could have answered the question, but I wasn't feeling all that helpful since they had bumped in front of me in the line, such as it was.

After some time, wrong place number one gave me bad directions to the right place, so I ended up in wrong place number two, the jury selection office. I wandered in through the out door clutching the arrest warrant in my hand, muttering something about being in the wrong place. My sheet-white complexion frightened the staff so much that they called the nurse to come check me out and made me sit down for about half an hour while I drank several glasses of water. I was dehydrated and had very low blood pressure, and nobody believed me when I said it wasn't that big a deal.

By the time I made it down to the actual courtroom, I was almost an hour late for my appearance, plus it turned out that the deputy I talked to hadn't rescheduled me so I was two hours late.

Does it seem like this story is going in a loop? That's exactly what I felt like sitting in that courtroom. After it was all over, I was excused from present and future jury duty in the District of Columbia. I have a nice slip of paper stating just that.

Of my fellow case pleaders, only two were excused with no fine or penalty. One was a woman who had moved to Maryland, the other was a woman who spoke no English. The rest were chided, charged $50 and sent on their merry way. I thought the judge took the whole thing way too seriously considering that it's almost as big a racket as parking tickets.

before - after