Well thank goodness! Jury duty isn’t until next week. Glad I saw this thread.
The woman I spoke with said that my status was indeterminate. No reasons were listed, but we spoke a little and it may be one of the following two:
[ol]
[li]I am being treated with ritalin for chronic fatigue. She said that sometimes they will not take jurors who take “mind altering” drugs. (her words, not mine.)[/li][li]I used to be in law enforcement. (In my mind, only sort of, but they say that technically I was.) Years ago I was deputized and wrote parking tickets for the city I lived in. I was not a police officer, but I did have to go to court when tickets were fought.[/li][/ol]
She said I should hear by this Wed.
The problem is that you can’t serve on a jury if you are insane. And, wanting to volunteer for jury duty is considered a sign of insanity.
Seriously, you can contact the County Courthouse and ask. However, I doubt anyone will know what to do in this case. You might be refused simply because they think you might have an ulterior motive.
If people can self-select for jury service by volunteering, then it becomes easier to pack juries by getting people who are well-disposed to you to volunteer.
No. Jury service would have been a personal obligation of your father’s, not a charge on his property. You were no more obliged to respond to his jury summons than you would have been obliged to respond to, say, military draft papers sent to him. And you were no more entitled to perform his jury service than you would have been entitled to cast his vote in an election.
Yes, I realize that I wasn’t “entitled” to serve in his place. But it was less than a week after his death, and I was feeling totally bewildered, and I was casting about for something to feel less helpless. If I’d called my lawyer she’d have explained it to me, but it was a five-minute walk from my office to the courthouse.
When I was in grad school another student got called in for jury duty. He went to the bookstore and bought a T-shirt with the school’s name blazed across it with the thinking that
(A) the lawyers don’t want someone ‘smart’ on the jury
(B) the lawyers very much don’t want someone who THINKS he’s smart on the jury.
He was not put on a jury.
Since then I’ve been called once and was empaneled, but I ended up being an alternate. super double waste of time.
I’ve talked to a friend who is a DA-type who expressed surprise that I was put on. DA’s apparently don’t like scientists and engineers. The burden of proof for science is much higher than for law. We can’t help but carry that perspective into the courtroom too. DA’s don’t like that.
It was a wrongful death case from mesothelioma Three weeks of testimony, mostly scientific. (which I found fascinating). I think a lot of them were just tired of the process.
The success of that depends on the Judge. Many judges take a real dim view of people ‘masquerading’ like this to get out of service. Also of people who volunteer very bigoted statements to attempt to get themselves excused. But Judges (and lawyers) see potential jurors every day; they get pretty skilled at seeing through such frauds.
Judges can find someone in contempt of court for this, and fine them or actually put them in jail (except our jail is usually overcrowded). Our they can chew them out severely – many judges are good at that. We had one judge who liked to ship such ‘fakers’ across to Federal Civil Court, where they could be jurors on corporate bankruptcy or patent disputes or copyright infringement cases – trials that were deadly, deadly dull and could go on for weeks.
There was the memorable case of the Whitewater juror who wore her Star Trek uniform to jury duty. She finally was expelled from the jury, but not for the uniform. She talked to reporters.
I haven’t observed this to be true in Silicon Valley. I was briefly on one case where an engineer with specific expertise in the area of the case was dismissed. Not for being an engineer, but for saying that if he knew the sky was blue and the testimony said it was green, he would not force himself to consider it green. (Roughly translated.) They seemed to have no problems putting me on, since I was a different type of engineer.
I saw this at jury duty in South Florida. Basically, if we didn’t get selected for this particular trial, then we were excused from further jury duty.
But first, the judge asked for reasons why anyone couldn’t serve on this jury. Many people stood up and said that they needed to work, couldn’t pay the bills, and yes a few even said that since the defendant was black that their racial prejudices wouldn’t let them be fair.
All of those people were told that they had to report back for jury service in 90 days. For the financial hardship cases, the judge told them to get a night job and save up over the next 90 days so that they could serve on a jury.
For the racial prejudice “fakers” they were told that they would be assigned a case where their racial prejudices wouldn’t come into play.
He basically told them that they would all be recycled through the pool and wouldn’t be excused until they had served on a trial, while all of the rest of us that didn’t get selected for the pending trial went home at the end of the day and were done with jury service.
It’s true to a point. There are so many engineers in Silicon Vally that the Judge that selected us for the Grand Jury did comment he didn’t want a entire jury of retired engineers. He was smiling, but I could tell he meant it. And engineers almost always have employers that pay for their time while on Jury duty. Thus, engineers may well dominate a Silicon valley jury unless they watch out.
