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I had jury duty this week, and I was almost immediately assigned to a case along with about two hundred other people. It was a big trial, scheduled to last six weeks or more. One of the world's largest multinational pharmaceutical companies is being sued for causing an individual's cancer. I now know (from outside research after I was excused) that the company developed and for decades distributed a drug which had concentrations of a known carcinogen at several thousand times the established safe limits. The medication was eventually withdrawn by the FDA for this reason. This is only one of many cases about this medication and its cancer risk.

I was randomly selected from among those hundreds of people to be one of the first juror candidates, number thirteen. Everyone filled out a lengthy 60-odd-question pre-screening questionnaire. At voir dire, the lawyers for both sides asked almost everyone about something in their questionnaire. Nobody asked me anything until the last five minutes of the pharma lawyers' time. They picked out each of the juror candidates who hadn't been asked anything yet and just said “What do you think?”. I replied that the plaintiff had set out a story for how he might have developed cancer and that I'm sure they'd bring in lots of evidence and experts and witnesses to substantiate it. The judge would tell us what standard of proof to hold that case to, then I'd do my best to judge whether the evidence as a whole met that standard. There were no follow-up questions for me.

In the first round of juror challenges, many people were dismissed for cause, and both sides spent five of their six peremptory challenges. Everyone moved up in their juror numbers, and I ended up number seven. In the jury box! A new round of candidates was randomly selected to fill out the pool of candidate jurors & alternates There was a second round of voir dire, where only the new candidates were asked questions. Another batch of people were dismissed for cause. Then both sides had the opportunity to use their last peremptory challenge. The plaintiff passed, and then the defendant dismissed… me?

I don't know why. I do not think that the answers in my questionnaire suggested that I'd be anything but a fair and diligent juror. Certainly nothing that happened in court suggested otherwise: I was neat, quiet, polite, and attentive. I was barely asked a question at voir dire, and that question was so bland as to be meaningless, as was my answer. I can only imagine that the defense looked me up online and decided that I have secret biases which endangered their case. Up until that moment, I had genuinely and unabashedly believed that I would be a fair & reasonable juror on the case. I would listen to the experts, look at the evidence, and consider carefully whether I thought that this drug was the likely cause of this man's cancer in particular.

But the lawyers certainly know more about the case than I do. If they wanted me off the jury for secret reasons, that sounds like a very strong signal that I should want to be on the jury — for those very same secret reasons! I'm disappointed that I didn't get to serve, even though six weeks is a heck of a long time to serve on a jury. In the end, I'm glad that I contributed to the jury selection process, that I forced the defense to spend one of their six scarce peremptory challenges on me. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, I think it would have been even more useful to expend more of their voir dire time on me, without giving them a reason to dismiss me for cause. But of course, during voir dire I didn't know that they considered me a threat. I had no idea about that until the moment they chose to remove me from the jury. The only reason I have to believe that I might be biased is that the defense implicitly said so.