A pool of perhaps 200 to 300 people was pulled from the nearly three million residents of the southern half of Cook County, Illinois (those living south of Roosevelt Road, a main road stretching from Chicago's lakefront barely a mile south of Chicago's Loop due west to the Cook County limits and beyond), summoning them to to Jury Duty for Monday, January 25, 2010 at the Bridgeview Branch Courthouse in that southwestern suburb of Chicago. Incredible as it may seem, one of the names the computer spit out for service was that of a resident of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, Barack H. Obama.
Yes, that Barack H. Obama!
An Associated Press report indicates that the President has informed court officials that due to his official duties he will not be in Cook County and thus is unable to serve in the morning for the standard "one day or one trial" of service.
How could this happen? More after the fold.
I happen to have more of an inside knowledge of how Obama got picked for jury duty, as I spent nearly 19 years working in an obscure office within the Circuit Court of Cook County, the Jury Commission (1979-1998). If you lived in Cook County during that period and received either a jury questionnaire or a jury summons, I was one of the people who was responsible for mailing that form to you.
When I began working at the Jury Commission in 1979, the laws governing automatic exemptions would have quickly excluded President Obama, on the grounds of being an attorney, not because he was the President of the United States. (The state statues at the time excluded the Governor and other statewide executive office-holders, members of the Illinois General Assembly, mayors, clergymen, journalists, judges, members of the military, court personnel as well as lawyers. I suppose after Adlai Stevenson's two lopsided defeats for President in the 1950s no one seriously thought this state would be the home for a President.)
It was sometime in the late 1980s the Illinois General Assembly began to repeal these occupational exemptions. I was finally called to jury duty three times in the 1990s, as my status as an employee for the Circuit Court of Cook County no longer excluded me from jury service.
So now even judges, even Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County Timothy Evans, are called to serve jury duty. (However, few of them as a general rule ever get picked to serve on a jury, since few attorneys demanding a jury trial for their clients would want a judge to be among the jurors, on the logical grounds that it would be like holding a bench trial.)
The branch court in Bridgeview is one of five such courts that mainly hear a variety of civil cases and municipal charges stemming from the suburbs in southwestern Cook County. So President Obama would not have been on a jury hearing a hot criminal case (those are heard in Criminal Court, located on Chicago's West Side) or a major civil matter (those are held in the Daley Center in Chicago's Loop).
Too bad; it might have been woth it just to see the look on the attorneys (and their clients) in some run-of-the-mill lawsuit to look up and see the President of the United States sit in the jury box. On second thought, I probably wouldn't want to be the courthouse custodian who had to clean up the floor after they all wet their pants!
As for President Obama, his stint with jury duty may have to wait until after heleaves office, and is in Cook county to respond to a future jury summons.