The elevator wasn’t working at Orange district courthouse on June 1, so I climbed the narrow wooden staircase five flights to the top and felt a pang of anxiety as I approached the courtroom where a person’s life can be changed forever.

A sheet of copy paper was taped on a wall next to an adjoining room that said “JURY DUTY.”

I walked inside, and a court officer checked off my name and gave me a slip of paper. I was, would be or might be, juror No. 11.

People in the “land of the free” have two obligations: to vote and to sit on a jury. The former is optional, but the latter is mandatory.

The Boston Globe reported the no-show rate for jury duty is about 6 percent. Those who fail to report are tracked down and face up to a $2,000 fine.

Lenny Bruce wrote that, “in the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.”

Deals are struck and plea agreements made, but when the stakes are high — be it a murder charge or second offense (and beyond) OUI — it usually takes a jury to decide.

Most of the chairs were occupied, so I took a seat at the head of a long wooden table in the center of the room. I looked around and counted 15 men and six women — one African-American woman and the rest caucasian.

Two men wore ties and another was in shorts, while one kept his sunglasses on his head and another wore a baseball cap.

We weren’t a cordial lot. We texted or napped. One read a book, and others simply sat upright and stared straight ahead.

This wasn’t my first jury experience. A few years ago, I was impaneled to sit on a jury that would decide the guilt or innocence of a Turners Falls man charged with drunken driving.

The defendant’s lawyer tried her best, but her client had been found asleep behind the wheel of a car that was down an embankment. The clincher was he’d refused a breathalyzer test.

Nobody acted surprised when we returned a guilty verdict. The defendant wasn’t hauled away screaming, “I’m innocent!”

Another summer, I sat on a grand jury, and for three months we met each Friday on the second floor of the Greenfield courthouse. We listened to prosecutors present evidence of arson, drug possession and other crimes, often to the point of overkill.

In 1985, New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler told the New York Daily News that district attorneys have so much leverage on grand juries, they could “indict a ham sandwich.”

Indeed, without defense counsel to rebut the prosecutors’ presentations, the evidence was overwhelmingly one-sided and we had no choice but to indict.

That grand jury service enabled me to avoid serving on a federal grand jury that I was summoned to less than three years later.

Citizens can postpone their jury duty to another date. My original summon was to report in January but I was in Florida and the date was moved to June 1.

The sun shone through the car window during the drive east to Orange. I stopped at Johnson’s Farm on the outskirts of that town for an omelette and toast, and bought a newspaper at Cumberland Farms on East Main Street.

The court officers’ neat attire reminded me of a midnight drive from Key West to Sarasota. Inside an all-night gas station, a portly deputy sheriff was eating a hot dog near the boiled peanuts and condiments. He was in a good mood, but wouldn’t be much longer — I left before he noticed the big blob of yellow mustard on his pressed white shirt.

After a half hour of waiting, we were shown a film about the history and importance of serving on a jury and learned that the right to be judged by a jury of one’s own peers dated back to the signing of the Magna Carta in 13th century.

The first jury trial in the American Colonies was in Plymouth in 1630. It didn’t end so well for the defendant. He was convicted of murder and hung to death.

The first time African-Americans were impaneled on juries in Massachusetts was in 1860, but it wasn’t until 1950 that women were allowed to serve.

When the 20-minute film ended, we returned to our newspapers, books and cell phones. I cracked open the New York Times and read in the obituaries that New Jersey marketing executive James “Jim” Byrne had died. His passions were “politics, sports and the vodka martini.”

An editorial criticized Donald Trump for “steering his pirate ship into unchartered waters” at a rally in San Diego, Calif., and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara were outed for spending $2,700 on ice cream.

In Croatia, a dozen men had thrown grilled meat, chicken and fish at startled customers inside a vegan cafe. When they were done, they, “pulled out cigarettes and started smoking.”

By mid-morning we were getting restless. A few of us stood and stretched and longingly looked out the windows at the clear blue sky over South Main Street.

Finally, a young court officer entered, followed by Judge David Ross in his black robe. The presiding judge of the Orange District Court thanked us and said, “We have someone who says he is innocent. These are real people and you have to judge whether they’re credible and whether the government has proven its case.”

Ross said jury impanelment would begin in about 20 minutes. None of us wanted to be in a courtroom on a nice day, and I sensed that though the verdict would be well-deliberated, it would also be swift.

We grew antsy again, when it took longer than Ross had promised, but after 40 minutes, the same court officer returned and asked us to follow him into the courtroom.

As he opened the courtroom door, he whispered for the man wearing the baseball cap to “please” remove it.

Judge Ross gazed down at us from the bench and appeared to be pleased. He said the case to be tried had been resolved.

“By being present and ready to serve, you have done your part,” were his words that followed.

Then, he dismissed us and we walked down the stairs and into the sunshine of a bright summer day.