Writing Topic #3 pg. 794

I turned eighteen the summer of two thousand seven and I was so excited because it just so happened that this birthday came about around the time that the Presidential Election occurred. Now knowing that I felt the need to vote and cast my opinion I registered and had my chance to vote, which I did. That winter, I got a jury summons thanks to the fact that I was registered and of all the people that were called in; I was, in the end, Juror number two. From the beginning I was nervous because I had never been involved in something so official nor had I ever been to court, and if you have ever been you know that there can often be a lot of strange, not so nice people, and that it not even counting the guards. So all in all it was my first real experience with being an “adult”.
The case that I was assigned to turned out not to be something violent or something involving the death penalty or something equally controversial, it happened to be a malpractice suit in which an older man, probably in his sixties, was suing two of his doctors for performing an amputation when he felt that he did not need one. As the case progressed the jury learned about various subjects, such as the man’s medical history, his lifestyle, and the doctors practicing history and interaction with this individual man. We learned that the man was overweight, which we could see, but we also learned that he had numerous health problems, the least of them Diabetes and the worst, blood clots leading to amputation. We learned that the doctors had repeadlty warned him that if he did not change his life style he would end up with the amputation, which he did. Even through all of this information and the validity of it, I still found it hard to be totally unbiased because looking at this man in a wheel chair made me feel really bad for him because he was a human being who could not live life as he was used to living it for so many years. By the end of the case, when we had all the information we would need to make a decision the jury was sent to a back room and given all the time we needed to make that decision. After only a few hours in the room we had come to a unanimous decision in favor of the doctors. The decision was not made as easily as it would seem in the time span, of course our decisions had to be made with no bias but it was still hard to tell that man that he had lost. Looking back I know we made the correct decision because it would not have been fair to let the doctors be blamed for something that was to patient’s decision. The decision made was not, for me, the hardest part however; the hardest part was taking part in a process by which one party would loose and the other win. This “official capacity” that was mine two weeks was difficult to deal with because it went against my inherent belief that I am no one to pass judgment on someone and by deciding against this man I could not help but feel like I was passing judgment on him for not getting or staying healthy. Now im almost twenty-one and to date I would say that this experience is the most serious example that I am able to give concerning a situation in which I had to act in a way that clashed with my personal feelings or beliefs.