“Okay, Sheriff, I know the drill.”
That was my thought a few days after Christmas last year. No, I wasn’t being arrested, interrogated or being asked whether I was familiar with his selection of power tools.
Rather, I was being asked, yet again, to serve as a prospective juror at an unspecified trial to take place 90 minutes down the highway in The Pas.
It was the fourth time since I turned 18 I had received a brown-enveloped letter requesting my presence at a jury selection hearing. And it became the fourth time I politely rebuffed the court system’s seemingly obsessive interest in me.
Before I go into the reasons, I fully acknowledge that many Canadians view serving as a juror as an essential civic duty, a way of giving back to a country that has given so much to us.
I’m not ungrateful to my country. And I do give back through charitable donations, tax contributions and honest attempts to be a good citizen.
I’m just not comfortable with the role of a juror. My go-to rationale is this: I don’t want to be part of something that could potentially let a guilty man free or put an innocent man in jail.
Look, whatever the accused man (or woman) at my would-be trial did or did not do, I was not there. Years in journalism teach you to see things with your own eyes and hear things with your own ears before deciding what to believe.
Often reporters learn of two or three or four different versions of the same event. And I’ll let you in on a secret: We don’t always know which version is accurate. We just present all sides and let the reader draw a conclusion.
I have what you’d call a logical personality. I can’t picture myself sitting in a courtroom, guessing whether a witness is telling the truth or correctly recollecting history. I’m not someone who looks into someone’s eyes and thinks, “He’s lying!” I’m someone who avoids making assumptions others often do.
So, as the Sheriff in The Pas has noted multiple times now, jury duty is not for me. When I write to him to explain why, a legal requirement for anyone summoned for jury duty but who wishes to abstain, I always say that I object on moral and financial grounds.
Those financial grounds, by the way, are not insignificant. Manitoba doesn’t pay you very much money to serve as a juror, and I don’t have one of those jobs where my employer will top up my missed salary.
I have had several people tell me that my ongoing crusade to circumvent jury duty is probably moot, as it’s unlikely a person working in the news media would be chosen. We’re too familiar with what’s going on; the courts want blank slates.
I admit that I have a bit of a Libertarian streak. My back goes up at the thought of the state forcing me or anyone else to do something against which I have moral grievances.
I feel silly having to justify this, over and over again, to an unseen Sheriff in The Pas with the power to force me to attend jury selection regardless of the ethical and financial implications.
But I keep doing it. It’s not about being lazy or unwilling to give back; it’s about the values I hold that no outside force should be able to trample on.
