Then the judge and lawyers would confer at sidebar, looking through the questionnaires we'd filled out, whittling the candidates for that trial's jury down to 30 or so. Then the 30 people would be called to stand up, one by one, and the lawyers would make notes, I assume about each person's age, gender, race, and general appearance ("slovenly" is the word I'm guessing was scribbled next to my name). Then the laywers would confer with the judge again and they'd bring the field down to 12 jurors as well as two or three backup jurors who would sit in on the cases but wouldn't participate in the deliberations unless one of the real jurors was excused mid-trial for some reason. This process took 30 to 45 minutes per case, and if I hadn't brought a suitably long book (Bob Mould's fine autobiography, See a Little Light), I would've been crawling the walls with boredom by the end of the day. There were a number of people who were just sitting there silently for the entire day, who I assume were enjoying a protracted tantric sex session, because there is otherwise no way they could've been so fidgetless.

Toward the end of the afternoon, I got selected for one of the juries (thankfully not one of the domestic violence ones, which I'm sure would've made my blood boil), and so I had to come back the following week for that trial. The courtroom itself was very nice, by the way. Cushy, relaxing chairs for the jury, air conditioning, and HD screens in front of each juror's seat on which evidentiary pictures were brought up in addition to being projected on the far wall. It was a far cry from what I'd imagined going in: the stereotypical movie courtroom with one slowly rotating, ineffectual ceiling fan high above the proceedings, the lawyers continuously blotting their foreheads with handkerchiefs while the jury sits uncomfortably on a wooden bench built at a 90-degree angle.

In the case we heard, the defendant was charged with "driving to endanger," which I gather is Maine's equivalent of reckless driving. Basically, this woman was accused of trying to impress her 20-year-old son by peeling out onto a fairly high-traffic road in her Mustang, then losing control and smashing into an oncoming flatbed. During the opening statements, the defense attorney didn't say much about the actual crime, and merely emphasized to us that the standard of proof for conviction in this case was "beyond a reasonable doubt," which told me he didn't have much of a case to begin with. (It reminded me of Owen Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums: "Everybody knows that Custer died at Little Big Horn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?") He was hilarious. He managed to carry himself in a way that made him seem simultaneously swaggeringly cocky and full of shame at how far in over his head he was. Here's a representative piece of dialogue from the case:

PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: So, Mr. James, did the defendant continue spinning her wheels right up until the time of the crash?
DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Objection!

[Two-second pause while the judge makes an exaggerated "On what grounds?" gesture.]

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I mean, "spinning her wheels"? What? It's ... [Trails off]

JUDGE: Overruled.

Before lunch recess, we heard the prosecution's argument (two eyewitnesses, crash scene photos, and the cop who arrived at the scene), and after lunch we heard the defense's argument, which consisted solely of the defendant testifying on her own behalf. While she was on the stand, the defense attorney brought up a few of the crash photos, and he seemed to be taking the tack of suggesting that the visible tire tracks leading directly from her entry onto the road right up to the crash site weren't hers, or at least could conceivably be somebody else's. However, that tactic was abandoned when the defendant repeatedly referred to them as "my tracks."

So then the defense's argument shifted toward it being the car's fault. Specifically, the defendant claimed that the driveway she was pulling out of was gravelly, and so she turned off the car's traction control because--although she claimed she had no idea what the traction control button actually did--she thought this would make it possible to get out of the driveway without gravel spitting up and dinging her car. Now, at the time of her testimony, I had no idea what traction control is generally used for. In fact, below is a complete list of my car-related knowledge:

But even I thought this was a pretty stupid argument. If you're going fast enough in a driveway that you're worried about gravel flying everywhere, then I'm pretty sure you're guilty of breaking some law. But anyhow, she claimed that she turned the control off without knowing what it would do, under the assumption that it'd give her more traction, I guess? She really wasn't clear on her reasoning. Anyway, she then claimed that she turned onto the road and the car somehow did its own thing and crashed into the truck. It was such a sad and transparent attempt to weasel her way out of culpability that the prosecuting attorney didn't even bother cross-examining her.

Then the attorneys presented their closing arguments, which were pretty close in tenor to their opening statements (D.A.: "We have evidence and eye-witnesses showing this is what she did." DEFENSE: "None of you were there, so who are you to say the car wasn't haunted?"), and the judge explained in detail what law the woman was charged with breaking. Interestingly, she emphasized that "driving to endanger" has nothing to do with intent in spite of the way the term sounds; the prosecution just had to prove that the defendant willfully made a decision that constituted exceedingly poor judgment.

With that, it was time for deliberation. In retrospect, we probably could've saved ourselves 40 minutes if we'd just taken a vote at the beginning of this session, but instead the table instantly broke up into four separate and simultaneous conversations:

• What's that thing the judge just said? We have to prove intent?
• I got an unjust traffic ticket once.
• I don't think the responding officer followed proper procedure at the scene, so I think we have to call a mistrial.
• My car has traction control!