Jury Duty: And then there were speeches

8:20 a.m.

Jury-room doyenne Lilly Yu walks up to the podium. THE PODIUM, I say.

She tells us that Judge Conner of Dept. I will be speaking to us at 8:45.

Judge Connor does just that. She is an attractive, blond, 50-ish woman. She tells us she has a 23-year-old son. In an effort to placate us, she says Ken Starr was in the jury pool last week. Was he a special prosecutor? Whatever his title was, he had Clinton's ass in a sling over the Monica Lewinsky affair. He didn't get on a jury. Big surprise.

Judge Connor has been on the bench for 20 years. She says that the goal of the new "one day, one trial" jury duty system is to call each person once every four years. Currently they hit up every person once every two. Seems about right to me. And you could get a blizzard of summonses, since the county dips into both the voter registration and DMV records.

She puts in this plug for serving on a jury:

"The human drama is better than anything you'll see on TV."

Does that include "Grey's Anatomy"? I didn't ask, because she could probably order my arrest right there.

She then went into a long story about a carjacking trial in which the jurors themselves "cracked" the case. I wonder if Dick Wolf has optioned that one for "Law & Order."