Small world. I never got called for it when I lived there, or elsewhere in CA. Been called a few times in TX, but never made it past voir dire.
If you don’t want to serve? Speak up during voir dire, and look like you’ve an opinion, or at least are paying attention to what’s going on. Peremptory strike incoming in 3, 2, 1… Such has happened at least three times for me, and I actually had room in my schedule to accommodate sitting on a trial. Unlike the poor buggers who actually did get selected, judging from our discussions in the hall while shuffling from one room to the next. So it goes.
Don’t try to BS your way off with an excuse. Although, if you’ve a ‘real’ one, IME, judges are accommodating or try to be. The Courts’ Clerk’s Office handling overall jury selection will listen to people asking to be excused/rescheduled too. At least IME, in Houston.
Lucky you. In 2003, my very pregnant (9 months) wife had the note from the doctor to respond to a municipal jury summons. The judge threatened her with arrest if she failed to appear. So, she appeared as ordered and missed a doctor’s appointment. The baby was stillborn three days later.
Oh, and fast forward ten or twelve years and I got a municipal jury summons. Despite my best efforts, that judge still presides. Outside the court, I told the city attorney that I would appear as ordered because I honor the law, but that I would not be seated in any capacity in this man’s court. She could either strike me now or wait for me to explain my reason in open court.
I didn’t have to serve.
It’s a small town where everybody knows everybody. I knew the city attorney and she remembered my reason for not sitting for this judge.
I got picked last year. Agreed that I would be there on the trial date. Just a few minutes before I was going to leave home to get there and find parking they called and said that the parties had agreed to settle, end of case.
Very frustrating for all parties involved – including the court personnel who must continually explain that no, we’re not at all interested in wasting your time and no, we’re not a bunch of incompetent boobs. Fluidity is in fact a hallmark of keeping justice moving along.
As irritating as that must have been, at least you didn’t have to rearrange your life to sit for days listening to a case you may not have even wanted to hear.
I got called three times and made it onto the jury once. We spent five days listening to testimony when the defendants decided that confessing to the crime on a jail phone (you know – the ones with a big sign above them saying the call can be monitored) was probably not a good idea, so they took a plea. The defense lawyers afterwards said that they knew they had a hopeless case, but the defendants were sure they could beat it and refused to take a plea bargain.
Yes, the national trend is that everyone who’s physically capable of serving as a juror ought to do so, if called. We even had a judge of our local Court of Common Pleas empaneled as a juror in the courtroom of one of his colleagues for a criminal case a few years back. Although the juror/judge had a reputation as a pro-defendant kinda guy, he became foreman and led the jury to a unanimous conviction.
But trial lawyers are still more likely to use a peremptory challenge to kick a lawyer off their jury, fearing that he or she will otherwise dominate or unduly sway the jury.
I’ve actually always wanted to be picked. But the two times I’ve gotten as far as being told the type of case I’d be on, they were both murder trials expected to last 3 weeks, and I was a waitress who couldn’t afford that much time off work. I would’ve loved to do a 3-day trial. I still would. And I could maybe afford 3 weeks off now (my job will only pay for one, but I have some vacation time saved) but it would be really hard on my coworkers/supervisees to have me gone that long.
That’s sure true. In fact, most of the lawyers I knew would kick anyone whom they perceived as a strong personality for exactly those reasons. I got kicked many times. Can’t think why.
I was picked and sworn in one case, though. It was a misdemeanor, I knew both the lawyers well and I think they each thought having me on the jury would advantage them somehow. Plus it was a bit of a lark and I think they enjoyed tweaking my judge (not the trial judge, obviously) since he genuinely hated working with alternate staff.
We got through opening statements and adjourned to the next day. Can you guess? The case settled before we got started again.
Oh, well.
Loved your judge story. I guess if you can get a judge on your jury, you ought to be able to count on him/her to at least be impartial and follow the law!
I remember a couple of our judges being called with a panel for jury duty. Although they could have gotten excused under the radar, they preferred to go through the motions and make a show of demonstrating to the other PJs that yes, anyone can be called to serve. I thought it was a good example to set.
I’ve only been called twice. The first time I was in and out: between being summoned and the date I was to be there, I was diagnosed with cancer and then scheduled for an operation two days after the trial was to start. Showed the letter from my doctor to the men who were checking jurors in that morning, got sent to speak to a judge for like 30 seconds, and then excused with a ‘Good luck’ by the judge.
The second time I got called for a panel and spent the longest six hours of my life sitting on a hard wooden pew while the other jurors were questioned, one by one. What annoyed was that we were far enough away that we could not hear what the judge/lawyers/potential jurors were saying, but we weren’t allowed reading material or talking to each other or any other distraction to pass the time. They filled the jury while there was still about eight people ahead of me, and the rest of us finally could go.
It was like six hours of the strictest imaginable high school detention.
Last time that I had to show up I was there two days and I got paid for my time, $15 a day I think. My deal at work was that I would get my regular pay but had to give jury duty pay over to the company. So I endorsed the check, and that was about an extra 5 cents in everyone’s bonus that year.
When that [quote=“kayaker, post:15, topic:919765, full:true”]
I’d love to do jury duty and have been called twice that I can remember. Both times I called and mentioned that as a small business owner I could not afford to pay my employees for time I wouldn’t be there generating income. They excused me, but I’d rather they’d offered $$$ for employee compensation.
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When that happened to me the response was pretty much “Gee, it sucks to be you, then”.
Many years ago, my jurisdiction had well- defined exceptions for small business key employees. But they eliminated those, financial hardship is your problem. I knew that when I mentioned it during voir dire, but I still figured they may not want a juror that was distracted with their persistent thoughts of financial ruin.
I was always good at finding the right thing to say during voir dire, in that it was cause me NOT to get picked.
But it didn’t work that day. The case was a dog, a lost cause . It involved a mentally unstable homeless man that was suing a shelter operated by a well-known national charitable organization for refusing him admission because he was drunk, which started a chain of events that led to him being assaulted.
He had managed to talk a law firm into making the mistake of taking his case on contingency, they probably figured they could get a quick settlement from their deep pockets. Then he refused to settle.
The lawyers literally seated the first 8 jurors they interviewed during voir dire ( the case required 6 + two alternates )- without asking questions deeper than “can you sit for 4 hours without falling asleep?”. The voir dire for the entire panel lasted less than 15 minutes and I wasn’t able to dodge it.
Both the defense and prosecution sent young lawyers that had never tried a case before, I guess they all saw it as good practice. The defendant lost handily, as expected.
It was actually interesting in a civics class sort of way, the judge was a really nice older man that offered procedural assistance to both sides, and went off the record a lot to describe the nuances and legal history of some of the procedures. And I have to say they bent over backwards to give this guy a fair trial. The defendant had one witness that was reluctant to waste his time in court and had a limited time window, so they bought the entire jury a free lunch so they could shorten the lunch break to accommodate his schedule.
I had a conversation with a Lockheed engineer who was tagged as juror for some civil case. It surprised her because during the voir dir both sides seemed to be aiming for people dumber than a box of rocks.
After the verdict was reached she was talking with one of the lawyers (I forget which side) and the guy shrugged. “Somebody’s got to be foreman.”
I had to go last summer for a whole week. I kind of enjoyed it.
I mean, there was a lot of just sitting around, but the day started at the same time as work and always ended in the early afternoon, like 200p. I was still getting paid at work, and jury duty paid like $15-20/day, enough to cover lunch and gas.
The trial itself wasn’t that interesting, just a breaking and entering, and ultimately we let him off because the prosecutor simply did not make her case. We all believed her, the guy definitely did it, but the evidence presented did not fully paint the picture so we had to let him go. The case they presented was much stronger against the defendant’s alleged accomplice, and I even told the judge so when she came to talk with us after it was all over, I said, “This guy, he probably did it, but they didn’t prove it. On the other hand, that other guy is in BIG trouble!” and she laughed. Granted, we let him off with the strong suspicion he wasn’t just walking out the door, implied by testimony given by police detectives during the trial, he was definitely still on the hook for other stuff.
You are right. I had a little bit of subconscious bias going there, I think - in that I automatically associated homeless and mentally unstable with the word “defendant” and I used it without thinking it through.
Kind of like the old joke - What do you call a [gradute of school X, resident of neighborhood Y, member of outgroup Z] wearing a suit? Defendant.
