There are about 136,000 people living in Humboldt County, according to the 2020 census, and about 106,000 of those people are adults. A few hundred of them will get a little white and red card in the mail during any given year telling them it’s time to sacrifice a little time out of their lives and serve on a jury, and many will have some kind of excuse and get out of it. Quite a few others will simply ignore the summons. Many of those that do show up will be excused. 

When the process is concluded, 12 people (about 0.00009% of Humboldt’s population) will be chosen for jury duty, statistically a tiny slice out of a county that’s larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined — so it’s incredible that this month, a husband and a wife from Eureka served together on the same jury. 

“The judge asked me ‘Do you know anyone else here in the courtroom?’” said Tori Wilmington, 47. “And I was like, ‘Well, yes,’ and he said, ‘OK, who do you know?’ and I said, ‘My husband, the juror in the back!’ And he was like ‘That’s never happened to me before,’ and the lawyers are looking at him too. ‘It’s never happened to us either!’”

It’s a pretty extraordinary coincidence that she, and her husband of 15 years David Wilmington, 53, both served on a drunk-driving trial. Both David and Tori wanted to make it on the jury, but for Tori it was especially exciting because she had always wanted to serve on a jury. She had been impressed on the importance of community service since a young age by her grandmother, and it left a mark on her. 

She was thrilled to be summoned when she was 28, but she had recently given birth and missed the selection. This time around, she was happy to be there and the experience lived up to her expectations.

“I know [most people want to avoid jury duty],” Tori said. “But I look at it like this: if I were ever to need to have a jury of my peers, I would want to know that not everybody sitting there hated every second of theirs; that they were actually going to pay attention, and that they were going to be interested in what was going on and be able to give me a fair shot.”

David, who had served on a few juries before this, wasn’t as psyched, but he enjoyed the experience of working together with his wife.

“Being with her means I don’t always snap so quickly to stand my ground, per se,” David said. “You’re gonna have disagreements. We always do, because we view things through different lights, and you have to learn to, frankly, shut up for a few minutes to absorb what information you’ve just got, rather than just let the emotional response happen.”

Both he and Tori would love to get a chance to repeat the experience, even if the chances of that happening are millions to one.

“You know, out of all the things that we’ve gotten to share over the years, this was just a really cool thing to be able to do together,” Tori said. “We’ve done other community service things together, so in a way, it didn’t totally shock me. We’ve always given blood together. We were Cub Scout leaders together. Serving our community together is not something new for us. This was just a different way for us to serve our community together. It was just a little surprising.”