The following story serves as a reminder that a particular witness can continue\u00a0to be a witness far beyond the event itself.\u00a0 Yesterday I spent the whole day at Media Court House undergoing jury duty selection for a murder trial.\u00a0 When the judge and attorneys queried me\u00a0about my answers to some of their form questions, my explanations may have helped de-select me, as follows:<\/p>\n
What was the crime that I had been convicted of?\u00a0 “Carrying the message directly to Christian employees of Lockheed-Martin that making weapons that could destroy the world was not a practice that Jesus could approve of.”\u00a0 What were the crimes that I\u00a0had witnessed?\u00a0“Workers for peace being arrested at the Pentagon and Lockheed-Martin (the world’s largest military producer) for their peaceful civil disobedience.”\u00a0 What was the maximum penalty for the crime for which I was convicted?\u00a0 “$500, but after hearing my defense at trial, the judge reduced\u00a0my fine to $100 and court costs, said he essentially agreed with me except for my method, and shook my hand.”\u00a0 Why had I said that could not promise to follow the judge’s instructions?\u00a0 “If there were a significant conflict between the law and my conscience, I would have to follow my conscience.”<\/p>\n
\u00a0Oh, and I wore a button (next to my juror button) that said “Support the troops.\u00a0 Bring them home.”<\/p>\n
So, no jury duty — makes me think of Arlo Gurthrie and Alice’s Restaurant.\u00a0 For those of you not old enough (or over-the-hill enough) to know better, that is an iconic song of the 70’s, putting in verse how a Thanksgiving Day misdemeanor (dumping trash illegally because the dump was closed) resulted in the unintended consequence of his being found unfit for the Vietnam draft because of his criminal record.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The following story serves as a reminder that a particular witness can continue\u00a0to be a witness far beyond the event itself.\u00a0 Yesterday I spent the whole day at Media Court House undergoing jury duty selection for a murder trial.\u00a0 When the judge and attorneys queried me\u00a0about my answers to some of their form questions, my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":365,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}