Wouldn’t it be strange if a trial got caught in a hung jury because Obama held out?

I’m bracing my ears and my mind for the onslaught of rhetoric that will be tossed about by the conservative pundits who are always eager to trash President Barack Obama on the grounds that he thinks he’s above the rest of us.

The issue that potentially gives them factual material to distort? Jury duty.

I’M GIVING THE Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist Mike Sneed the benefit of the doubt that she accurately reported in the Sunday newspaper (which I still enjoy reading) that Obama received a summons for jury duty.

According to the Sun-Times, Obama is expected to be at the Cook County courthouse in southwest suburban Bridgeview on Monday. Of course, that is not a guarantee he would serve on a trial. I remember the one time in my life I did jury duty, I spent the entire day at the Criminal Courts building, not learning until about 8 p.m. that my presence on a jury was not needed.

For what it’s worth, the newspaper reported that the summons was sent to the Obama residence on the edge of the Hyde Park neighborhood – the house where they haven’t really lived in just over a year. One has to admit, it’s not every day that a jury summons winds up having to be forwarded to the White House.

Now I don’t expect Obama to be at the Bridgeview courthouse on Monday, and White House officials on Sunday admitted he had asked for a waiver from duty. People who happen to be eating at the International House of Pancakes restaurant just a block or so away will not see the president stop by for a quick cup of coffee before proceeding to the courthouse.

I’LL GO SO far as to say what would offend me would be if Obama were to somehow try to fulfill the summons – which by its very existence shows that legally, Obama is still a Chicago resident. If he had truly transferred his address to the White House, it would be the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia that would be seeking his presence for jury duty.

I do expect that this particular president has more important things to do than to be sitting around a courthouse with a paperback copy of that novel he has been wishing he had time to read, but never was able to do until now. (That literally was how I spent my day of jury duty). Or maybe he’d have a copy of a health care proposal to try to amend into something (anything) that could get passed into law.

So I expect (although I don’t know for sure) that Obama already has had his staff file the legal request for him to get him out of having to be in Bridgeview. Not that Bridgeview isn’t a cute little suburb, but he has more pressing issues to deal with.

Although it would be a hoot if the Cook County sheriff were to have to show up at the White House some day to take Obama into custody for skipping out on jury duty. Then again, Rod Blagojevich’s arrest in late ‘08 on paper was hilarious – the reality was more pathetic than funny.

PERSONALLY, I THINK everything I have written thus far is pure common sense. You don’t try to drag a chief executive of the United States into a courtroom to serve on a jury. It throws the whole jury dynamic out of whack and also causes serious disruption to the nation.

Yet I seriously expect to hear from pundits who will complain that Obama is somehow being elitist by thinking he ought to automatically get out of jury duty. After all, they want to criticize him. It doesn’t matter what for. They just want criticism, no matter how illogical it is.

There’s just one thing I’d have to wonder of the people who are likely to try to use this jury duty incident as an issue – what did they have to say when Obama made that trip to Copenhagen to try to talk up the U.S.A. and his hometown of Chicago as a site for the 2016 summer Olympic games.

I still remember all the people who got all bent out of shape and claimed that making such a trip was a distraction for Obama from his presidential duties. Having to sit through a whole day of jury duty only to be rejected because some prosecutor doesn’t want anyone detracting attention from his arguments against the defendant seems like an incredible waste of time.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Does this mean that Barack Obama is still a Chicagoan at heart, if he’s getting jury duty summonses (http://www.suntimes.com/news/sneed/2007588,CST-NWS-SNEED24A.article) from Cook County. What I’d like to know (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/01/no-jury-duty-in-bridgeview-for-obama-busy-week-ahead.html) is if he has mailed in his absentee ballot yet for the Feb. 2 primary elections.

What would happen if Obama did jury duty, got picked and had to remain in Bridgeview on Wednesday (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60N1U720100124) – the scheduled date for the State of the State address.

Courthouses to remain open on weekends, at least for the time being, Evans says

Perhaps some people think the only place where crime occurs is on the South Side of Chicago and in those suburbs that happen to surround it.

That was the impression I got from learning of a plan desired by the Cook County sheriff’s police to shut down the bulk of the courthouses based in the suburbs. Sheriff Tom Dart justifies the change as a cost-cutting move, saying he could get away with less staff if the courthouses in Skokie, Rolling Meadows, Maywood and Bridgeview didn’t have to be open on Saturday and Sunday.

FOR THE MOST part, they’re not. But invariably, there is crime committed Friday and Saturday nights, which means that bond hearings have to be held. That means a judge, his clerk and the deputies needed for security, have to be on call for the weekend.

Either that, or else those defendants would wind up having to sit in a holding cell at a local police station for several days until a Monday court hearing could be held.

That would be a financial burden for the local cops (whose cells are set up to accommodate a person for a couple of hours before he is transferred elsewhere) and for the judges who would have to preside over extremely long Monday dockets.

So I was glad to learn that Chief Judge Timothy Evans (who I still think of as the former alderman who was the first loser to Richard M. Daley for mayor of Chicago) sent Dart a letter this week telling him to forget (for now, at least) any talk of shutting down those courthouses.

“SERIOUS ISSUES OF public safety, due process and court administration have been raised that I believe deserve attention,” Evans wrote in his letter to Dart, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

Those issues include what struck me as an obvious flaw up front about Dart’s proposal – the logistics of expecting that the county could do without those four courthouses in operation for the weekend.

For Dart’s proposal would not have left Chicago and its inner suburbs courthouse-less on weekends.

The county court’s first district (which is the city of Chicago proper) and it’s sixth district (the south suburbs, with a courthouse in Markham) would have remained open.

DOES THIS MEAN Dart (who early in his legal career was an assistant state’s attorney assigned to the courthouse in Markham) really thinks all the crime is concentrated on the South Side? That somehow, the north and west portions of Cook County have no need for a judge to hand down those rulings determining just how much money someone’s family has to come up with in order to keep their loved one from spending the next few months in Cook County Jail while awaiting trial?

I’d like to think Dart, who earlier this year was extremely critical of state officials for being shortsighted enough to think that video poker revenues would resolve the state’s financial problems, hasn’t suddenly fallen victim to similar shortsightedness.

Somehow, I don’t think all those northern, northwestern and western suburbs get that peaceful on the weekends. Nor do I think their local law enforcement officials want to have to take the added time to haul their defendants into the city to achieve Justice through a court hearing.

Part of the reason Cook County’s court system is broken up into the six districts is because there is just too much potential for overload at the Chicago courthouses if they tried to do all the work there.

AND WOULD THIS mean that some of those city cases would wind up getting shuffled down to Markham tp make room for all those northwest suburban “criminals” who now need to take up court space in Chicago?

It just seems to me that this is one of those necessary expenses that we’re going to have to live with.

After all, Thursday in Chicago is another one of those furlough days – a cost-cutting measure by which city employees will not get paid. So they’re not going to work. They get the day off and most city services will not be available.

But even with the concept of furloughs, police and fire department officials are still expected to work.

THINKING THAT THE county could shut down the bond court on Saturday and Sunday in Maywood or Skokie is about as short-sighted as thinking that the Belmont District or the Calumet Area of the Chicago Police could suddenly use some time off in order to save the government a few bucks.

It just doesn’t work that way.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is trying to portray the county’s chief judge as irresponsible (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/12/suburban-courts-ordered-to-remain-open-weekends.html) for not going along with his desire to shut down some of the suburban courthouses on weekends.

It’s a four-day (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-christmaseve-clos,0,3070094.story) holiday weekend for City Hall workers – or more like five days for those municipal employees who just slacked off on the job on Wednesday.