Juror looks back at the adventure that was her ‘civic duty’

Maribel De Leon got a letter in January saying she was being assigned jury duty and should report to Chicago.

De Leon, of West Dundee, called her brother to find out what trains would be the best ones to get her to the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Dearborn Street, the Dirksen Federal Building. Her brother said she must be confused. “What are you going to do, the Blago trial?” De Leon remembers him scoffing.

Indeed, it was.

After three rounds of questioning, De Leon found out she had been chosen as one of the jurors — certainly not a dream come true for a woman whose first thought was, ‘Wait, I’m not supposed to be here.’

De Leon left her home a little after 6 a.m. for the length of the trial and deliberations, drove her 4-year-old son to his grandmother’s house and then took a train to Chicago. She wouldn’t get home again until after 7 p.m., too tired to cook and already having missed her husband leave for the night shift.

For months it stretched on, her three kids missing mom’s cooking, herself tired of the schedule and time away from her family.

“It was very difficult,” De Leon said. “But we made it work. We knew it wasn’t going to last forever.”

Aside from missing families, other jurors also missed work. Almost all of them had full-time jobs and a few were self-employed — meaning if they didn’t work, they didn’t get paid. At least two had to cancel flights because they got picked even though they told selectors they were going to be out of town.

While jurors were fulfilling their roles, De Leon said authorities were very accommodating. They provided breakfast and lunch for the four-day workweek jurors kept, referring to each man or woman as sir or ma’am.

“I think they treated us like royalty,” De Leon said.

But it was hard decisions these jurors were asked to make and they took their jobs very seriously.

The 12-member jury went through each count one-by-one, led by foreman Connie Wilson, of Naperville. De Leon said if the jurors ever got stuck on a point, they would set it aside and move on only to come back to it later.

The two extortion charges for which the jury had no verdict came when 11 jurors realized they would not be able to change the mind of a single holdout — a different person for each count.

For De Leon, the worst part was convicting the former governor.

“I feel for him and his family,” De Leon said. “I wanted to find him innocent.”

But like the rest of the jurors, the facts before her prompted De Leon to say guilty again and again, 17 times.

De Leon hopes this trial will give her immunity from any future ones, laughing that she did her part already. But participating changed her. She feels more invested in politics and plans to do more research before voting in the next election.

And now she has 11 new friends — and they’re already planning a reunion.