Seriously? Why do you pay taxes? Why do you do most of the things you do that you don’t particularly like to do? You do it because you owe someone, or because of a threat of a penalty if you don’t do it. You do it for the same reason you would go into the military if you were drafted. You do it or you face consequences.
Yes, seriously.
Taxes - how much did you make, send in x%. If you dropped out of school in 5th grade & I’m an unemployed PhD & we’re working both side-by-side at McDonalds, we’re paying the same amount of taxes. Education doesn’t matter because it’s objective criteria.
Draft - as long as you weren’t excluded, typically for objective physical/medical issues which created a physical barrier towards service, you were in. Your religion or political leanings don’t disqualify you.
Where else does the government 1) require you to share your subjective beliefs, which can’t be verified & 2) exclude you because of them?
Why? As a good-faith effort to determine whether you’re a complete idiot, or incapable of/unwilling to evaluate facts impartially in a situation where you’ll have power over a stranger’s livelihood and possibly even their life. Something I presume you’ll want applied to your own jury, should one ever hold your life in its hands.
Welcome to society, by the way. It’s always nice to welcome a new member.
You also have the duty to tell the truth-if you hate black people, not revealing that would be perjury.
Unless it has changed radically since the mid 80s when I did jury service, in England there is very little opportunity to challenge prospective jurors. Council are not allowed to question them and, IIRC can only object to 3 jurors each. We don’t not have the same jury selection process you have in the US.
Anecdotally, the best way to get excluded from a trial is to wear a blue pin-stripe suit, carry a cheap briefcase and a copy of the Daily Mail. Prosecution are likely to object to you on the basis that you are possibly a hang-em-high reactionary.
This would get you several days of jury pool selection in the US. Gotta admire the UK taking this more seriously.
Being for jury nullification in a way that doesn’t inform the rest of the jury pool would get you out of it for criminal cases in the US.
So far just throwing the notice away has worked. In fact I haven’t gotten another one in years. Yeah yeah, Duty not optional, so is following the posted speed limits, everyone (mostly) decides what laws to follow.
Just get a prescription for a diuretic and demand a urinal in the corner of the jury box.
I am a member of society; a pretty great one, too. I can live where I want, I can choose my job/career. This society I live in also has a free press that it not subject to government censorship & freedom to associate with whom I wish.
I can walk into any corner bar that I want to & if I don’t like the political/religious banter, I’m free to suck it up & stay there silently, get up & leave, or chime in & espouse my views but it’s my choice what to do, I’m not forced to give my opinion. I can also share the events of my day with my SO, cow-orkers, or friends/family & ask for their opinions/advice.
Yet on jury duty, I loose these things. Hell, the government can even [del]kidnap[/del] sequester me for certain trials. These are the actions of a totalitarian regime not a free society.
As for your first comment, I am far from an idiot, yet I may be unwilling to evaluate facts impartially; you see, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. If it’s late in the day & I’m in the minority during deliberations, I may very well ‘change my opinion’ to get back to work/$ because $9/day just doesn’t cut it. Which, by the way, is far less than the minimium wage that the same government mandates that I would have to earn anywhere else.
As a court administrator, I have to say that I hear more excuses, whining and complaining about jury summons notices than anything else I deal with. It’s especially ridiculous because while our term of service is two months long, we virtually never have any trials. No matter how much I tell people that they don’t have to show up every day, don’t have to even call in and that we’ll send them a letter a couple of weeks in advance IF we actually have a trial, they still spend an inordinate amount of time bitching about getting the notice in the first place. It makes me absolutely INSANE.
These are the actions of a government that provides jury trials. How can you have the right to a trial by jury of your peers, if every one of your peers has a right not to serve on a jury? If you have a way around this, please, enlighten us.
Spiderman, you have a serious problem with perspective if you can’t tell the difference between the minor inconvenience of jury service and a totalitarian state. This is all the more so when it is apparent that the logical end of your position is the unavailability of trial by jury, widely thought to be a major bulwark against totalitarianism.
What I’m hearing is: I love living a society that affords me so many rights and freedoms, including the right to a fair trial by my peers, but I personally can’t be bothered. Known colloquially as the “special snowflake” theory of jurisprudence.
At least you can rest in the assurance that yours is not a unique viewpoint, which is precisely why jury service is mandatory and enforced by threat of penalties.
And what I’m hearing is that the ways don’t justify the means. He’s right about sequestering basically being kidnapping. He’s right about the horrible compensation being a reason to change your opinion so that you can get back to work. He’s right that your rights to free speech are greatly curtailed by the government when you are in a court.
Why the hell do you assume that he’s against trials by jury? It just means he’s against the tactics mentioned above, none of which are required for jury duty. Pay people at least a living wage, or just require employers to give paid leave to jurors. Don’t sequester people or limit their knowledge. Don’t have judges that can put you in jail without a trial for saying the wrong thing.
None of the bad stuff about being on a jury that Spiderman has mentioned are necessary for jury trials. Cut the patriotic jingoism and think rationally about it.
Spiderman is both perfectly right and perfectly wrong.
He’s perfectly right that any state compulision of any kind is basically the same evil. Any blah blah about “choosing to accept the benefits of society” is BS because there is no alternative.
He’s perfectly wrong in a practical sense though, because he isn’t going to live infinitely long and common sense means that he has to adapt his ethics to reality. Therefore he pretty much has to see this as a duty.
It’s still wrong to compel anyone to do anything, mind.
No it isn’t. There are some things that simply have to be done in order for the human race to have a functioning society. If he doesn’t want to serve on a Jury, he can go be a hermit in the wilds of Idaho. That goes any of a 1,000 things that we are compelled to do (in one way or another) in order to follow the laws of the land. I have to pay taxes, send my children to school, follow zoning rules, recycle, have a functioning sewer system, follow building codes, keep my property relatively clean, wear pants when I go to the store*, the list is endless.
One of those things is spending half a week every few years being bored at City Hall.
*Seriously, what the fuck is THAT all about?