During a jury selection I was in, one woman was very disrespectful to the judge and the attorneys. The judge cited her for contempt, but instead of giving a fine, ordered her to report for jury service again the next day. In California, if you’re dismissed from serving, it still counts as service and you’re done for the year.
Since for most people, their time is more valuable than the any fine the judge could levy, it was a rather effective deterrent to rude behavior in court.
That’s the thing - that’s totally against the whole jury idea. You’re not supposed to bring that personal knowledge into it.
When I went in for jury duty one time, a guy claimed that he “didn’t acknowledge the authority of the justice system or the courts.” He was dismissed, but it makes you wonder why he bothered to show up to begin with.
There’s a fine line there somewhere. You’re certainly allowed to use your personal knowledge to evaluate the witnesses and evidence. But you’re not allowed to use your own expertise to generate your own theories about the facts of the case.
At least, that was my understanding from the judge’s instructions in the case I served on the jury. I am a physicist and part of the case involved weapon ballistics. In deliberation, I felt that some of ballistics testimony was flaky and I told the jury so. But I didn’t make any statements about what I thought was a more reasonable hypothesis.
The first time I got called for jury duty, I was on the verge of moving out of the area, and so noted that on the form I got with the notice, no problem. Cept, I wonder if they have any way to check the veracity of the claim? Do they have systems in place to double check if the county still sends you auto tag renewals? Or property tax statements? Or other means to determine that you lied?
It was interesting, though, that pretty quick after I moved back, I was summoned again.
I did not make my self clear. It could be a factor depending on the case and the lawyers involved. What I meant was it is not an automatic get out of jury duty free card.
This is true here. I get jury notice every 4 years (you can only serve every 4 years). Being a cop does not get you out of jury duty.
But the truth is whenever I fill out the questionnaire and put down my employer they end up putting me on the reserve juror list, which means I don’t even have to show up, I just have to wait during those 3 days for a phone call. I’ve yet to be called. Every other cop I know whose gotten jury notices has the same thing happen. There would have to be a lot of trials before reserve jurists are called up.
I can confirm that for Arizona. I was recently called for jury duty and acknowledged that my brother was a police officer in Houston. I was not excused based on that. One of the lawyers might have excused me later with a pre-emptory strike (or whatever they call it when they can excuse a juror without giving a reason), but just having a brother as a police officer wasn’t enough.
I did eventually get excused. This was a very, very high profile case that the prosecution was going to ask for the death penalty if there was a guilty verdict. To try to speed up the jury selection, they called 200 names and gave us each a questionairre to fill out. Based on those answers, they were able to eliminate some of the potential jurors without having to go through time consuming questioning in court. What surprised me was that I was called back. Some of the questions were about capital punishment and I made it perfectly clear, both with my answers to specific questions and in the comments space at the end that I was totally against capital punishment. I was one of the initial 12 seated, went through all the preliminary general questions (including relatives in law enforcement), and got to the individual questioning by the lawyers. As the prosectuor was tap dancing around the question about capital punishment, with the defense lawyer objecting to some of the questions and them being re-phrased, I finally interrupted the prosecutor and asked if I could make a statement. I was so allowed, and I told them that I thought I could be a fair and honest juror, and that, if the verdict was guilty, that I could honestly evaluate whether there were, under the law, any mitigating factors so the defendent should not be sentenced to death. I said I could do all of that fairly and impartially, but, when it came to the final vote about what the sentence was (and in Arizona, the jury determines if it’s death or life in prison), that, even if the law said there were no mitigating circumstances and death was the proper sentence, I would vote against it because I personally would never sentence another person to death. I was thanked for my time and excused.
Like I said, I was really surprised I was called back because I thought I had made all that perfectly clear in my responses in the questionairre. My guess is that the defense was hoping that somehow they could get me onto the jury.
I simply never answered the call. No one called again, no follow up letter…nothing.
I was on a jury once. I thought it was absolutely fascinating. It was a three-day child molestation trial, two days of which were deliberations. And I was fairly amazed at the intellectual rigor that went into the whole process on the part of the jurors; I was seriously expecting some sort of rush to judgment as we went into the jury room, but the first vote was in favor of acquittal and eventually everyone’s minds were changed and we convicted the guy. Amazingly interesting. It was one of the things that led me to decide to go to law school.
But, during voir dire, there was a guy who said an arrest is absolute evidence of guilt, and he was excused. And the attorneys asked the venire what they would change about the legal system, which oddly resulted in a thirty-minute gripe-fest amongst the judge, the attorneys, and some of the jury pool about frivolous law suits.
Now that I’m a lawyer, the odds are very good that I’ll never make it onto a jury again, although I was recently called up for federal jury duty, but just getting to the nearest federal court would be a massive burden.
I’ve been called for jury duty twice, and both times been selected to serve on a jury, although for one of them I was the alternate. (In this jurisdiction, at least, they select 13 jurors and randomly choose the alternate after both sides rest.) Both times were criminal cases, and both were very interesting. I can go into details if anyone’s interested, but won’t be offended if nobody is. I was selected the first time despite speaking up way too often during voir dire, and I was selected the second time despite serving on a hung jury the first time.
I dunno why people are so eager to get out of jury duty… I thought it was fun. (Then again, I was blessed with an employer that continued my salary while I was serving.) If you’re in a pool for a trial that’s expected to last a long time, you can be excused if you plead hardship.
One thing that sticks in my mind was during voir dire the first time, one of the lawyers (I believe it was the defense attorney) briefly talked about jury duty and what goes on in a criminal court room, and said something along the lines of, “It’s not like Law and Order.” I thought it was exactly like Law and Order. Just about everything I’d learned about criminal procedure through watching TV proved to be accurate.
I’ve just been summoned for the first time, filled out the questionaire and received another. I live very near the county courthouse.
I enjoyed my experience, too. I don’t often say it out loud, since people make horrible faces at me and call me weird. But I liked it.
I served on a jury once, many years ago, for a very short (and pretty dumb) civil case. So I do know what it’s like to actually be on a jury. Didn’t do anything one way or the other for my faith in the system (maybe because it was such a dumb case).
The last time I was called, a group of us filed into a courtroom wherein the first thing to happen was a few people trying to plead hardship. I was amazed at the lengths the judge would go through to try to keep people from getting dismissed.
When the first twelve of us were finally called into the actual jury box, we were each handed a list of questions. The judge then went through us one-by-one, asking if there were any questions that we could not answer “yes” to.
One of the questions was along the lines of, “Do you agree to follow the judge’s instructions, even if doing so goes against your personal conscience?”
I honestly answered that, no, I could not do that. The judge got visibly annoyed, and admonished me that following his instructions was my duty as a juror. I said I knew that, but my honest answer to the question was still that I could not agree to do so ahead of time.
I was dismissed, and that fulfilled my service for that time.
I’ve told people this a number of times: If you really want to get out of jury duty, don’t plea hardship, don’t be a smartass, just tell the judge that in all honesty, you can’t agree to put aside your conscience if it conflicts with his instructions. I guarantee that this will get you out of jury duty with no contempt charge. You’re not being contemptful, you’re answering a question that the court asked you, and how in hell could anyone know if it’s your honest feeling or not? (You probably should not, however, use the actual phrase “jury nullification”).
In my case, by the way, it’s totally my honest feeling: If my conscience says “X”, and the judge’s instructions say “Y”, my conscience wins, every time.
The last time I was called for jury duty, the standard questions were being asked about bias. One college student replied, “I study psychology and I know we all have biases whether conscious or unconscious.” and then got up to leave the jurors box.
The attorney asked the judge to order her to remain and she stayed as a potential juror for a day and a half before they got tired of her and let her go. The sad part was I wanted to be on the jury and I got dismissed after one question. After three days of jury selection, the attorneys were getting more informal so my only question we were getting was, “Do you have any preconceptions that would prevent you from giving my clients a fair verdict?”
I told her that I am a mathematician so if you want someone who can listen to the evidence dispassionately and vote based on whether or not the prosecution proves guilt by a preponderous of the evidence, then you want me on this jury. However, if your defense will be how your client made bad choices or fell in with the wrong crowd and want me to vote based on compassion, then you want to dismiss me.
I was dismissed.
In between the above two mentioned times, I was called for an auto accident case. The defense attorney asked if any of the potential jurors had any background in physics. I raised my hand, and said that I had been a physics major in college for a few years. He then asked whether, if I was on the jury, I might be inclined to perform some sort of an experiment to test out any claims made in court. I was somewhat taken aback by the question, but give it a little thought and said, “I suppose I might”. He immediately asked for my dismissal.
That was when I really lost faith in the system. No one cares about the actual truth, and neither side wants a juror with any level of intelligence or ability to think.
As a juror you are supposed to make a decision based only upon the evidence admitted in court. You don’t know why some things are not in evidence (there may be some very good reasons from a legal standpoint) so you can’t just go off on your own. You can’t go doing your own experiments and you can’t go off and do research on the defendant, for example. There was recently a case where a juror revealed that he’d been Googling the participants, going out to try and gather his own evidence, etc. IIRC the verdict got tossed, everybody’s time and money was wasted and they had to start all over again.
This doesn’t mean that as a juror you’re a mindless drone, just that the legal system has certain rules and all the participants need to abide by them.
I served on a jury. At first I thought it was a really interesting experience but it left me depressed with the whole jury system. It’s the best system we have but in my experience the three loudest jurors bullied the rest and they were let because some of the others just wanted the decision to be hurried up because they didn’t want to have to come in for another day. Luckily it was a civil case so no one was sent to prison or ‘let off scot free’ unjustly. But the defendants put in an immediate appeal and I think the result is very likely to change. A waste of everyone involved’s time and money and emotions. All because of a few bullying jurors and a few lazy/ irresponsible ones.
Still though, what’s the alternative? 
We’ve had this discussion a few times before:
Testimony in Spanish, one juror peaks [sic] Spanish can lead to mistrial?
It’s not that they legal system doesn’t want intelligent jurors - rather, it’s a division of labour. It’s the function of the parties to put before the court the evidence that is relevant; it’s then the function of the jury to assess that evidence, bringing their common sense and general experience of life to decide the case. The last thing I would want on a jury in a case I was running would be a stupid juror who wouldn’t understand the case, wouldn’t be interested in thinking it through, and wouldn’t want to do their best possible job with a difficult case.
There’s also the basic question of fairness to the parties. One of the most fundamental principles of a trial is that both sides know exactly what evidence is being presented to the jury, so that both sides can do their best to comment and explain it. Having a case decided by secret evidence is the antithesis of a fair trial - and that would include secret experiments conducted by the jurors.
As I put it in the iphones & jury thread:
Likewise. I’m glad I wasn’t asked this question; answering it honestly would certainly have gotten me dismissed. I pondered long and hard about the issue before I came to court… the fact is, I think that such jury instructions are probably unconstitutional. In the American legal system, as long as a verdict is not procured through corrupt means (such as bribery, extortion, blackmail, etc.) jurors are accountable to nobody for their verdicts. So if for example a defendant clearly broke the law, but jurors think the law itself is unjust, it doesn’t matter how many times the judge tells them “even if you don’t like the law, if you find that the defendant broke it you must convict”, if the jurors acquit the defendant, he’s acquitted, and that’s that, and the jurors are not subject to punishment for their disobedience. (I think, anyway. IANAL.)
But of course declaring a belief in the doctrine of jury nullification will get you dismissed from service. So the ethical question I was struggling with was if I had the moral right (or even the moral obligation) to lie during voir dire. As a contrived and exaggerated example, imagine a jurisdiction which mandates that black men must lower their eyes and bow their heads when addressing white women, and imposes the death penalty for uppity violators. Suppose in this jurisdiction, many (or even most) potential jurors think this is outrageous and would never vote to convict and execute a man for the offense. If they tell the truth during voir dire, a lot of people will be unfairly executed. By lying, they can save lives and prevent injustice. May they lie? Must they lie?
Tough one. Again, fortunately, it didn’t come up. Something that did come up was this:
In both of my trials, this question was addressed to the jury pool as a whole, and without the final qualifier, something like “if anyone has any preconceived notions or prejudices, raise your hand.” Nobody did, including me, but I was rolling my eyes to the ceiling. Of course I had preconceived notions or prejudices. So does everybody who’s not a newborn… we all have heuristics burned into our brains from a lifetime of experience.
For example, I’ve heard that something like 90% of criminal defendants are convicted (I don’t know if that only applies to cases that go to trial or if it includes guilty pleas.) I also happen to have sufficient faith in The System to believe that the vast majority of people who are convicted are in fact guilty, and from that it follows that if you’re in that defendant’s chair, you probably did it. If I walked into a criminal courtroom at the beginning of a trial and knew nothing whatsoever about the parties or the facts, and I were given the opportunity to bet on whether the defendant was actually guilty, I wouldn’t hesitate to put my money on the affirmative.
But that shouldn’t matter. I may think that the defendant is guilty. Heck, I might even be sure that the defendant is guilty. But my job as a juror isn’t to decide whether the defendant is guilty, it’s to decide whether the prosecution has proved the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. It’s like the math teacher who calls a student to the board and orders him to prove the Pythagorean Theorem. The teacher knows perfectly well that the Theorem is true, but that doesn’t prevent her from accurately judging whether the student’s proof is solid or faulty.
But rather than trying to explain all that, I just kept my hand down along with everybody else.