I thought jury duty was for suckers

Then I served, and never felt more significant

The night before I had jury duty, I contemplated searching online for tips on how to get out of it. I knew from pop culture that this was the thing to do.

In “30 Rock,” Liz Lemon dresses up like Princess Leia when called to serve so she will seem insane and be dismissed. In Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life, if you land on jury duty, you lose a turn. I had come to believe that jury duty was for suckers. Then I served on a jury, and my perspective changed.

As the midterms approach, voting is capturing attention as an admirable civic responsibility. But jury duty is characterized as a pain. Why have we come to see these two ways of participating in government so differently?

When I was called to the criminal court of Cook County, Illinois, I was selected to serve from a group of people looking bored and annoyed and sent to a cramped jury room with a water cooler that was out of water. Most of my fellow jurors were as shocked as I was to have been chosen.

We chatted as we waited for paperwork to process and then were summoned to the courtroom. All we knew was that the defendant had fled from the scene of a routine traffic stop. Then, we saw a police officer’s body cam video, and the mood changed.

You have probably seen a video like this: A traffic stop that escalates quickly. A black man driving. Several police officers surround him. The driver resists the orders he’s given. The officers threaten violence.

The video was 1 minute and 41 seconds long, and the entire time I found myself praying that no one would be shot. No one was. But now it would be our task to decide whether the driver was justified in leaving the scene because he was afraid for his safety.

It was late when we saw the video. As we left for the evening, our deputy said she would have lunch for us the next day, but it wouldn’t be good. The state was on a budget. A younger white man suggested a pot luck. We laughed, imagining bringing Crock-Pots through security. But he was serious. A snack pot luck, he said.

Reading about Jason Van Dyke’s trial and verdict, I couldn’t help but think of the jurors on that case. Like me, they probably assumed they’d just sit there all day and then go back to their lives. Instead, they ended up deciding one of the most important cases in Chicago’s recent history.

A trial like that shines a spotlight on the important role of jurors. But outside of high-profile cases, the attitude toward jury service is dismal.

Granted, there are differences. Voting typically takes maybe half an hour, while jury duty can consume days or weeks. People who freelance, own a small business, or work in positions paid by the hour could suffer financial hardship. Caretakers might not be able to get away for even a day. There are good reasons to avoid jury duty. But it should not be a punch line. The next morning of my service, people dropped Double Stuf Oreos, Nutri-Grain bars and Cheez-Its on the jury room table. Every single person offered up something. These small gifts felt like more than food. They felt like an implicit pact to get through this with respect for each other.

After a day of testimony and evidence, we were sent to deliberate. We all had different perspectives. Different questions. Different concerns. It became subtly clear that we had different politics. But to a one, my fellow jurors were kind and considerate and felt the responsibility of our task. In the end, we found the defendant not guilty — meaning he was justified in leaving the scene because of the threatening actions of the police officers.

We are told there is a great divide in our country, and at the voting booth that is apparent. But in the jury room, we were just 12 random people pulled out of our daily lives and asked to administer the final decision in a case. It felt like our justice system at work.

I’ll vote in November, and it will be important. But I don’t think I’ll ever feel as significant as a citizen as I did in that jury room.