Any 'Juror Handlers' here?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This may be a long-shot, but it sometimes seems that there are people on the SD who know/have done EVERYTHING in the universe.

I recently did my civic duty of jury service. Here in Massachusetts that means one day or one trial, and in my case it mostly meant a lot of sitting around. Wait here, go to a courtroom, wait while others potential jurors are questions, get questioned myself, get excused (for my personal experience as victim of a similar crime, it seemed like), go back to the first place, wait some more, get sent to a second courtroom, wait while others are questioned, get sent back to the first room when they’d filled their quota before they got to me, wait there a little bit, then get thanked and sent home because they didn’t need any more jurors that day.

IOW, I have nothing to complain about. It was just a minor disruption of my usual life and mildly annoying that in the end it was for no purpose but I was treated politely and respectfully by everyone I encountered. Overall it was just rather boring.

But I wonder how those who are on the other side see it? I mean, every day they have a fresh lot of potential jurors to herd around. It’s likely a first time experience for most of the jurors. They don’t know where to go, what to do, they have to be told everything, they must ask the same questions over and over and over. Same old, same old, day after day.

Or maybe not.

Do funny/strange/interesting/weird things ever happen? Do the jurors behave strangely – or badly – or cop attitudes – or end up having to arrested for whatever themselves?

Do we say the darndest things? One of the jurors I heard being questioned thought she should be excused because she had parrots that would be lonely if she was gone all day. I thought that was pretty… different.

So, any experiences you’d like to share with us?
Edited to add: Or if you had an interesting experience AS a juror, you might share those, too.

2

Moderator Action

Since this is informally polling for personal experiences, let’s move this thread to IMHO (from GQ).

3

You are lucky that it was only one day.

Where I am (York County, PA) you serve for a week. You sit in a large room with a lot of other potential jurors, and you are given a number. Periodically, they call out numbers, and if your number comes up, you go to what’s called a “panel”. You are taken up to the courtroom and the prosecution and defense both ask a bunch of questions and whittle the panel down to the final 12 member jury. If you are eliminated from the jury you go back to the main room and wait for another panel. If you serve on the jury, if the case ends before your week is up, you go back to the main room and wait for another panel.

Since the numbers are chosen at random from folks sitting in the big jury room, it’s possible that you might never get called for a panel. It’s also possible that you could get called multiple times.

Like you, I found the experience to be mostly boring. I brought books to read, and at one point they had a movie for us to watch to pass the time (Second Hand Lions). I finally got called for a panel on Thursday, and ended up serving on the jury for the case, which kinda surprised me since they asked a lot of questions about whether we had any friends or relatives who were police officers and I had several of both.

The case involved drug and weapon charges. We found him guilty on the drug charge and not guilty on the weapon charge. We had a bit of a laugh since you’d expect a drug dealer to have a scary gun of some sort and this was a rinky-dink little thing. Since this was the end of the day on Thursday and they had plenty of potential jurors for the amount of cases they had on Friday, we were told that we were done for the week.

The handlers were nice and friendly, and they knew that we didn’t know what we were doing so they were sure to give very clear instructions at every step of the process.

Nobody misbehaved or did anything weird while I was there. It was mostly boring and uneventful.

4

Love the timing here.

I have been home 2 hours, just having spent a week on a trial. Charges were rape(4 separate charges). I was the foreman. We found him not guilty of all charges.

Exhausting, draining, stressful, and emotional.

5

No experience from the other side but I’ve been called in for jury duty twice. In both cases it was a one day affair and we were all dismissed without appearing at a trial.

6

Been called several times, impaneled thrice. Around here (NW OH) once you actually serve on a jury you are done for that turn. You’re on call for two days, but if you serve and are done by noon the first day that’s it. You go home and stay home.
One of the trials involved a trash hauler suing a company for not paying trash bill. Customer had lots of records showing that trash was not picked up per contract. Trash hauler had lousy records, could not even prove they EVER picked up trash. In the jury room we had 8X10 glossies of overflowing dumpsters with gulls and everything. As we passed them around somebody started humming “Alice’s Restaurant” Several of us joined in. (We found for the customer)
Another one was a DWI case, pretty straightforward. The defendant’s atty started by challenging the initial traffic stop. Then it came out that the defendant had sideswiped the parked cruiser. He complained the deputy (sheriff) '“wasn’t very nice”. The deputy couldn’t open the driver’s side door, and had to climb out over the center stack of radios, shotgun, etc. He was not happy. (we found him guilty. He blew a 0.22 BAC, limit back then was 0.10. )

7

I’ve been called several times but only once did I actually have to go to the courthouse. I sat there whilee potential jurors with numbers lower than mine were called for questioning, and a jury was seated before my number was reached, so I got to go home.

The case was an involuntary manslaughter charge, domestic violence with the woman alledging self defense. I read about it in the paper. A lot of the questions potential jurors were asked involved the marital status of the PJ, and whether or not they’d ever been a victim. One guy, when asked if he was married answered in the affirmative, and then, when asked how long he’d been married replied “This time, or cumulative?” A female PJ would be asked how she prefered to be addressed, if married, “Mrs. or Ms?” One gal looked down her nose, over the top of her glasses, and said, very firmly, “It’s Doctor!”

8

I was called for (potential) jury duty for a murder trial and the judge asked if anyone had a valid excuse why they couldn’t serve on the jury before we were separated into smaller groups.

There were a dozen or so people who said they didn’t speak English very well; one Chinese guy who worked at a meat packing plant spoke English quite poorly, for instance. But one guy (East Indian, I think) came up and said he didn’t speak English…in perfectly fluent English. The judge asked him what he did for a living, and he said he was a loan officer for a major bank. The judge’s incredulous response (“You’re a loan officer who doesn’t speak English?!?”) was pretty funny and the whole courtroom got a good laugh out of it. Well, except for the loan officer who didn’t manage to weasel his way out.

Later, they were telling us to form into groups based on our juror number and job title and the court clerk read out “Juror number 123 – batcher?” Clearly the guy who worked in the meat packing plant wasn’t very good at spelling either!

9

In my jurisdiction, the jury wranglers (bailiffs) have potentially one of the most tedious tasks I can imagine.

They have to show each jury pool an introductory video of what the whole thing is all about. Takes about half an hour. And they have to sit in with the pool and watch the same damn video every day or two.

I’d be rage-spewing if I had to deal with that as part of my job.

10

I was called for jury duty twice in the small town where I used to live. The only room big enough to hold us all was the single courtroom itself, so we sat there while plaintiffs and defendants and their lawyers came and went, talking to the judge. One guy came in the room with his lawyer, took one look at the room packed with small-town farmers and ranchers who would potentially make up his jury, and he decided to take a plea.

Big city courts could learn from this… have a monitor up in the corner of the courtrooms where the accuseds (can I make a plural out of that?) can see that there are hundreds of bored, cranky people just waiting to pounce on his/her case… might motivate more people to take a plea.

When I was called for jury duty after I moved to the city, it was, as others have said, a long day of waiting, reading (the jury room had wifi, so spent time on my kindle and may even have visited the Dope), blahblahblah, and ultimately was sent home with no action. When I got home, my dog, who wasn’t used to being locked up for eight hours at a time (I was a freelancer), had committed major diarrhea on the living room carpet. She was mortified. Fortunately, the carpet was not wall-to-wall and I sent it out to be cleaned the next day. The end.