A town like Hollywood has a very high percentage of famous celebrities. However, I never hear about them being called in for jury duty.
I’ve come up with a few reasons for this:
They do participate just like the regular people. They sit in a big room all day with everyone else, waiting so see if they are called. And when they are used nobody really cares, it’s totally uninteresting, and so it doen’t make Entertainment Tonight.
Even though there are a lot of famous people in Hollywood, they are a very small percentage of the entire city of Los Angelas, and a jury pool is randomly selected from the entire city, so it would be very rare for a celebrity to happen to be picked.
Famous people are automatically excused because they would be a big distraction for the rest of the jury and for the case itself.
Celebrities (or their people) are always able to find ways to talk their way out of jury duty.
So what’s the straight dope on this?
They have jury duty just like everyone else. On shows like “Celebrity Justice” I think they even have a regular feature regarding who’s in trouble for ditching jury duty and who’s a responsible citizen and went. They were just recently interviewing someone on the courthouse steps (I can’t remember who) who joked that since he was between acting gigs he was doing it for the $3 a day.
I remember Oprah got called a while back. When Dubya was Gov of Texas he got called. They do sometimes show up and every time I have heard that they are excused because their presence would provide a distraction (in Dubya’s case, I think it was a criminal case which would have been a possible conflict of interest.)
Peter Guber, former studio head at Sony, was on the Winona Ryder jury. Guber’s not a household name to the liukes of you or me, but among celebs, he’s someone whose calls get returned.
When I was called for jury duty here in NYC in early 2001, Janeane Garofalo was there the first day. She didn’t seem to do anything to try to get excused based upon her name or fame, she sat in the pool with the rest of the jurors and read a book. I tried to see what she was reading, but I couldn’t find a way to catch a glimpse of the cover without staring at her in a vaguely freaky stalkerish way that didn’t seem appealing.
On my second day I saw actress Donna Murphy (Tony award winner, not a household name or face, though) happily taking off her juror badge during the lunch break; she was either excused or her trial had ended, I’m not sure which.
On my third day, my trial was cancelled for the day so we were excused about the time that the batch of new jurors for that day were arriving, and in that batch was Chris Noth from Law & Order/Sex and the City. No word on whether he tried to get out of service, but he didn’t look at all happy to be there.
One possible reason you’ve not seen a lot of celebrities at jury duty call, is that, in order to be called for jury duty, one must first vote in a general election; this gets ones name put in the pool of names that are selected from.
Many celebrities, due to apathy, hectic schedules or whatever, simply fail to vote(You’ll notice on election eve they always show the candidates doing their civic duty, but you rarely see footage of movie stars and such going to the polls).
This makes them ineligible for jury duty(I know a few people who have deliberately not voted in order to not be selected for jury duty).
Not very famous but certainly a known name to some in NYC, Charles McCord, the news reader/sidekick on “Imus In The Morning” was called for jury duty a few years ago and served since he missed several days on the show while doing so. Imus claimed that he shows up when called but says everyone looks guilty to him when in a jury pool until he is dismissed. He only might be kidding.
In my neck of the woods when I had jury duty, the closest thing to a local celebrity was the guy who owned the local pool table dealership. But a crowd of people flocked around him to talk at every break, quite the popular fellow.
There was also a case a few years back involving Deidre Coleman, Imus’s wife, being called for jury duty. She asked to speak privately to Judge Waxman to explain who her husband was and that he was going to cover the trial on his news show, so maybe she shouldn’t be on the jury.
Apparently Waxman went ballastic and said a few choice things to Mrs. Imus, which she told her husband. He then related the story on his show and called Waxman a few choice words. Waxman in turn threatened to sue Imus.
