How did Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey end up on a jury for a felony case in the middle of the season?

It’s not something you see every day. In fact, it’s not something that has ever happened on record for a professional athlete in the middle of a season.

In 2018, Cleveland Cavaliers shooting guard Donovan Mitchell was excused from jury duty. While with the same team in 2013, Los Angeles Lakers small forward LeBron James had to serve jury duty, but was not selected. As did fellow Basketball Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant and swimming legend Michael Phelps throughout their careers. Former Cowboys punter Chris Jones was selected for a jury back in his home state of Georgia during an offseason, but never has a player had to serve on a jury in the middle of a season – at least in public knowledge.

That was until Cowboys All-Pro kicker Brandon Aubrey was selected to serve on a jury for Tarrant County’s 297th District Court last Tuesday. He served on a 12-person jury that heard a second-degree felony assault case that ended with the defendant, Daniel Rincones, being found guilty and sentenced to 65 years in prison.

How exactly did Aubrey find himself on a jury in the middle of the Cowboys’ season?

In Mitchell’s case, he was able to get a team executive to call the court and excuse Mitchell on his behalf. Aubrey’s status as a public figure could’ve been easily seen as a distraction to the court, but the Cowboys kicker fell through the cracks.

“I pushed it back, and when I called to push it back a second time, they didn’t allow it,” Aubrey said on Wednesday. “And it slipped through the cracks until it was too late.”

Aubrey was first called to jury duty earlier in the season. A call to push it back was granted, but Aubrey could not get it pushed back to the offseason. Had it been, he said he would have gone without an issue. Even with Aubrey having to fulfill his duty mid-season, he never thought he would end up being selected.

“They were calling people by name, asking for any sort of conflicts, and I put my hand up,” Aubrey said. “[The judge] went through the room, the rest of the section, and then came back to me, and before I could really say anything with my hand up, he just said, ‘Oh, you won’t have any conflicts. We don’t meet over the weekend,’ and he walked away.”

Aubrey said that he could have raised an issue, as the Cowboys do practice during the week and put hours of work into film study, but he chose to remain quiet.

“I could have been more assertive,” he said. “And at that point, everyone knows who I am there. I don’t want to sound like I think I’m better than anyone else or that I’m above the job, so I kind of sat there quietly and didn’t say anything which was probably a mistake. I figured at that point, ‘Still, he’s not going to pick me.’”

With a sister-in-law who is a district attorney in Dallas County and a brother who is a lawyer, Aubrey was convinced his jury duty responsibilities would be a quick in-and-out process.

“I have a DA sister-in-law, and she said, ‘They will never pick you with your public figure status,’” Aubrey said. “I disclosed that I had a sister-in-law who was in the DA’s office in Dallas, and my brother’s a lawyer. I was just kind of told I wouldn’t be picked, so I just sat there, and I didn’t really say much. I was definitely surprised when he picked me.”

Instead, he was required to be in court in Downtown Fort Worth from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. every weekday from Oct. 22 through Oct. 30 to hear a second-degree felony assault case.

“Eye-opening, long, frustrating, depressing, hearing the story,” he said about the case. “The story was a sad one. I don’t really want to get into all the details of the story, but it was very depressing and dragged on longer than anybody expected it to, so [I’m] glad it’s over.”

After being in court for eight hours per day, he would then drive 90 minutes in rush-hour traffic back to Frisco to kick in the dark with his fellow special teams players, punter Bryan Anger and long snapper Trent Sieg.

“It’s tough to see when you’re kicking in the dark,” Aubrey said. “You can’t really see where you’re kicking. And for Bryan in particular, trying to catch the snaps, he had a hard time at first tracking the ball and hitting the spot. It makes my job harder, especially when I can’t see what spot he’s put the ball down on very well.”

Even in the chaos, Aubrey said he was reminded of a similar time in his life, not too long ago before he was signed as a former soccer nobody to the USFL’s Birmingham Stallions in 2022, where he would work an office job as a software engineer before traveling over an hour to kick a football before the sun would go down.

“I wanted to go to the indoor, but we had a high school game [in Ford Center],” he said. “So on the field fighting the sunset, it reminded me a lot of my schedule as a software engineer when I’d work from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and then go race down to this area, a local field not too far away, and try to fight the sunset as well. It’s something I’ve done before.”

Funny how life comes back around sometimes, isn’t it?