Jury Duty

My life has been on hold the past two weeks. Jury duty.

Had to serve 3 of the 10 days.

They say the best way to get out of jury duty is to read the Wall Street Journal. How about material about real estate?

Day 1, read all my magazines, including old issues of the neighboring county’s landlord association.  Serious withdrawals by not being allowed to check my phone, already.

Day 2, started Brandon Turner’s book on real estate investing. And as I read it I can totally hear his voice reading it aloud. Freaky.

Day 3, realized that deliberations were going nowhere.

The co-defendants could easily be our tenants. Low income. A string of poor decisions. Doing the wrong thing to make ends meet.

I didn’t think they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Some of my fellow jurors kept pointing to the fact that the way they lied to the police, acted shifty, and could not produce banking records meant they were guilty of the crime.

I thought of the book See Poverty…Be the Difference: Discover Missing Pieces for Helping People Move Out of Poverty by Donna M Beegle. Where I see police as protection and a positive influence, the poor see the police as a negative force – they see friends and relatives arrested, they feel judged, get evicted, nothing good comes from an interaction. They participate in an underground economy; so many do not have bank accounts, so of course there are no records. They don’t have the tools and experience to do a lot of due diligence toward smart decisions. Again, that doesn’t make them criminals, and the prosecution has the burden of proof.

We had a hung jury.  I was in the majority.