Dear DeKalb County:
I’m intrigued and impressed by your jury processing. I guess with a population of 752,088, you need to have your act together.
On Monday, I arrived at the courthouse as Juror 401 of 1,001 called. That’s a shocking number. In my experience in Chatham County, I had to call every night to see if my number was up the next day.
Not y’all.
You call everyone in.
Judges and attorneys get one day to make a decision to field a jury. And that’s genius because it puts pressure on people to settle.
While I waited to see if I was chosen (and by the way, I am NEVER chosen), I had the pleasure <sarcasm alert> of sitting between two of the kinds of people I hate: A guy watching videos with no headphones and a woman talking loudly on her phone.
Why, Sir? Why must you torture me?
The other people in the room were sitting quietly. But I was sandwiched between these two.
And the guy sat RIGHT NEXT TO ME, even though there were dozens of empty spaces all over the room. He was so close, I could smell his chicken-biscuit breath. I had to move down one chair.
It happens all the time. I can be in an empty movie theater, and the only other person will sit one seat over.
Why don’t people understand personal space?
[Insert deep cleansing breath.]
I’m not sure this is common practice, but it was surprising to me that one of the judges emerged to test out what he thought was a rousing stand-up routine.
It was, predictably, about civic duty and, unpredictably, the importance of driving under the speed limit.
At least my seat neighbors silenced themselves for the occasion.
A little while later, I was dismissed. My case was settled while I was seething.
But that part was not your fault, DeKalb County. You made the process as painless as possible.
See you in two years!
Beth
Observe and report 
I work with those folks in Superior court and you are right they are efficient and there’s not that many of them to process all of those jurors but they get the job done and they work hard.
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