lol because EVERYONE chooses their residence based on jury duty laws
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I don’t see any cherry-picking there. The intro says that is the characterization of the US population (not necessarily the current fact, but how the US has been historically characterized, you know, pioneering American spirit and all that), and the report is putting numbers on it. The numbers show that the majority stay in the state they were born in, so BigT has a point, if we agree that “same state” is a good proxy for “same area.” It really hinges on what is meant by “same area.” From my perspective, it doesn’t seem like that controversial a statement.
That’s another issue. There’s an old saying that “only stupid people get picked for juries” which I don’t agree with, but don’t think that social stigma isn’t out there.
Another issue is employer pressure. Back in the 90s I sold real estate and my Broker went apeshit when he found out I was called into jury duty selection and coached me on what to say during questioning to get out. That, btw, should be illegal.
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No one cares.
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Yes, I’ve done it. As I’ve said twice before, one Christmas was ruined because of a murder trial. I’m very, very sorry that you had to play with your phone all day! Is there some way that I can make that better?
When someone’s freedom (or their money, in the case of a civil suit) is at stake, I think any objective measure would find that the societal interest in what they have at stake far outweighs a temporary inconvenience on your part. Because implicit in the term “civic duty” is that you aren’t doing something because it is for your own personal gain.
The times I’ve called to jury duty – it happens about once a year here in DC – I recall that judges hear various motions and arguments interspersed with trials. “Sorry, Mr. District Attorney, I don’t have any time today to hear your argument to issue a warrant to raid a drug dealer’s house. The jury only wants 45 minutes for lunch today! Come back next week.”
I’m going to address only a few points in your post, because I perceive most of it to be merely whining. But in answer to your question about whether or not court staff, attorneys and/or law enforcement must be subjected to jury duty, the answer is yes. I was regularly called, went through the same process as anyone else and have been sworn in as a juror. In my one instance of becoming a sworn juror, the case settled after 2 days of testimony and we were excused. Judges, lawyers and cops I worked with were all regularly called and subjected to exactly the same process as everyone else.
You asked about the 2-3 hour lunches. There is a common misconception that when a judge is trying a case, he or she is not doing anything else. In fact, they are dealing with literally hundreds of other cases each day doing arraignments, pretrial conferences, pretrial motions, signing and moving orders through the court, conducting ex parte hearings and many other tasks. The extra time is for the courts to do this other important work. Jury trials are sandwiched in and around the rest of the court’s schedule. No one is sitting around eating bon bons.
As for why so many jurors are called per case, courts know how to use those panels very well. Out of 150 prospective jurors, likely a third to half will be excused for cause such as financial hardship or an obvious bias in the case before regular voir dire even gets underway. If each side of a case has 20 peremptory challenges – not an uncommon number of peremptory challenges – then you’re likely going to lose another 40. You’ll also continue to lose some for cause as voir dire is actively conducted and you learn who might be related to parties and/or witnesses in the case or who might have too much personal knowledge of the case, etc. That leaves roughly 20-25 of true, qualified prospective jurors who might actually be able to serve on your case, consisting of 12 regular jurors and 2 alternates, which is pretty standard. So you’ve got maybe 10 to spare. It’s a much bigger waste of everyone’s time if you get through 2 hours of jury selection and then run out of prospective jurors. The case must then be recessed until a new panel can be summoned.
In really big and/or highly publicized cases, it’s not unusual to qualify thousands or prospective jurors. Jury selection can take several weeks. Look on the bright side. You only have to do it every few years. Judges and court staff have to endure this mind-numbing process many times a year. We don’t like it any more than you do.
Selling real estate should be illegal?
Why?
I worked for a spell for some fairly high profile defense lawyers, and they tended to prefer jurors with higher education levels. I’m sure prosecutors might have a different perspective, but, from what I observed, voir dire selection seemed to vary wildly by an attorney’s personal philosophies and what I would characterize as superstitions. The voir dires I sat in on, though, did not seem to be biased towards the less educated, but those cases were disproportionally complex cases (RICO, terrorism, political corruption/patronage, etc.) so I do have a biased perspective. Plus, you only get a certain number of peremptory challenges (no reason given) before having to strike jurors for cause. That said, the only case I ever got to the voir dire process on, I was one of only two jurors that was tossed, and I couldn’t figure out why or which side tossed me.
What about the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants? They weren’t born in the same state. Currently, immigration is also a big issue in Europe, and elsewhere. Heck, what about the snowbirds who descend on Florida, Arizona, and Texas every fall/winter?
It’s nonsense to exclaim that people cannot move from where they were born.
To be fair, I think a lot of people (myself included, as I said in my post) really wouldn’t have a problem with serving on a jury, it’s getting called to serve, clearing your schedule and then doing nothing for two days.
What’s your point? Seriously? My post had exactly zero to do with serving on a jury. Your Christmas was ruined because you’re were deciding if someone should go to jail. I’ve now lost (more or less) 6 days of work to do exactly nothing.
I think you misread my post, I didn’t mention anything about that.
In my city, they send everyone in the jury room out for lunch and tell them to be back in two hours. Again, this isn’t about serving on a jury, this is about the jury pool.
Maybe by you, clearly not where I am. At least from this civilian’s stand point, they’re calling up waaaay too many people.
Someone upthread mentioned something about a murderer being let go because of the lack of a speedy trial. I’m not sure if that’s even an issue here, but maybe a law of statute could be adjusted, just a bit, so that the courts could summons, say, half as many people as they do, more would get called to actual trials and if they didn’t have enough people to put together a jury, it could be postponed until some following time.
FTR, just quickly pulling up this NPR article it appears that each year 32 million people get summoned, 8 million show up and 1.5 million get selected. So…maybe…could we cut how many people we send out summons to by half? How about we lengthen the time between serving? In Milwaukee it’s 4 years, maybe make it 6?
Again, I’ve never served, that’s not my issue, it’s the incredible waste of time. At least now I can call in (twice a day for two days), but the two days are still shot.
Important because your job requires it or important because you want it? Because no matter how important, I’d love to be able to say “Sorry can’t come in today, jury duty. If you have a problem take it up with the judge”
Sure. Price, jobs, weather, politics, traffic, schools are all excellent reasons to pick a location.
“How they pick juries” would be about 147th on any rational persons list. So are you done with this hijack?
Yep. Ive been called four times and served once- a four day trial. And the thing that I notice is absent from your post is this: it only takes an instant to think, “why do they need us?” and maybe an hour to actually find the answer to your question. If you spent an entire day wondering why they need you, the problem is not with the system, it’s with you.
It’s “duty,” not happy fun time. Cowboy up.
They know how to use the jurors. Just because you don’t comprehend, that doesn’t mean they don’t know.
This is called “good trial strategy,” and being part of it is part of your job.
While you’re eating lunch, they’re working. Again, just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
[QUOTE=Joey P;19537823FTR, just quickly pulling up this NPR article it appears that each year 32 million people get summoned, 8 million show up and 1.5 million get selected. So…maybe…could we cut how many people we send out summons to by half? How about we lengthen the time between serving? In Milwaukee it’s 4 years, maybe make it 6?[/quote]
Summon half as many, and there will be a proportional decrease in the ones who are fit to get selected. Basic math.
Uh-huh, and while the jury was at lunch, the judge was most likely holding a motion hearing (possibly about the very case you were about to hear), or the court was processing other paperwork or taking care of other jobs. Would you have been happier if the jury pool was told they had to come back in one hour, and then they got to sit around the jury room for an extra hour while the court did all that? If not, when would you like the court to take care of all of the other duties it has?
I don’t believe statutes of limitations work like that, if only because of the potential for abuse. (The state could hold somebody indefinitely by NEVER calling enough people to put together a jury.)
Time between serving is determined largely by factors in your location; there’s not some national rule. How many people on the list in your area are ineligible to serve (e.g., have a felony in a state where that is a legal impediment), or have financial or child care barriers that give them a pretty automatic excusal? How many of the summonses sent in your area will be undeliverable, and how many potential jurors just won’t bother to show up? How does your locale compile the list (drivers licenses, voter registration, etc.), and how that list compare to the actual number of jurors needed each year in the courts of your area? There are not uniform answers for those questions.
Beyond that, suppose you only get four million people to show up, instead of eight? You still need 1.5 million to fill out the juries; what happens when three of those four million get excused for cause or are struck for various reasons. Now you’re short half a million people, which means a whole lot of trials get postponed. Think of all of the disruption to the plaintiffs and defendants and witnesses who made time for the trials. Moreover, justice delayed is often justice denied. Why worry about the widow suing for wrongful death, or the landowner trying to settle title to property, much less the guy sitting in jail because he can’t make bail–let them wait for another six months or a year, because your time is really really valuable.
The alternative, of course, is for the judge to send the deputies out to start rounding up jurors. You’d planned to do your grocery shopping this afternoon, or you were hurrying down the sidewalk past the courthouse on the way to an important meeting–oops. How’s that for disruption?
So what’s your alternative? What instructions would you give to jury coordinators to make absolutely sure that they will always have enough jurors to fill out every panel, and never waste anybody’s time?
So your contention is that I misread your post? How, exactly? Seems like you were directly asking Happy Scrappy Hero Pup if he, personally as a lawyer, had had to undergo the jury selection process. I’m not him, but I answered as court staff who certainly had to undergo the same process. And I personally knew many lawyers, judges and law enforcement officers who also did.
How is it clear you’re talking about serving on a jury and not serving on a jury pool, and what difference does it make, anyway? You’d be treated exactly the same whether as a prospective juror or a sworn juror. The 2-hour lunch breaks are the same throughout the process for the reasons I outlined. Since you’ve never even served on a jury, it’s hard to know what experience or evidence you are relying upon in drawing your conclusions except your brief experiences with being summoned. You’re basically just bitching about being inconvenienced, and you don’t seem to care about the reasons behind the delays, which I have tried to explain.
In reading your link, I think it just demonstrates what I keep trying to tell you: Jury selection is a highly inexact process. Every case will have different jury selection issues. There’s no standard way to pick a jury. It’s tough to quantify, and there’s no “science” around it. Courts are not interested in wasting people’s time, but they have a job to do, too. They know well how much people hate jury duty and try hard to not impose more than they have to on their available pool of jurors.
You also appear to assume that because so few jurors serve, many are “wasted.” That’s simply not true. Apart from those who simply fail to show up, the difference between the number who serve and the number who are excused is because of how many get excused for cause during the voir dire process. I think you’re making a lot of assumptions about a process you know very little about, and don’t seem terribly willing to learn more about it.
Where I lived and worked as court staff, the court was responsible not only for administering justice for the county, but also had jurisdiction over a large prison population and a large mental institution population. That meant we had jurisdiction over every case arising out of charges brought against inmates in those places as well as regular mandatory procedural hearings. The net result was that we summoned a lot of jurors. If you lived in my county, you could count on receiving a jury summons every 18 months – and were likely to serve on a jury, too. Consider yourself fortunate you only are subject to being summoned every 4 years.
Guys, maybe we should lighten up on Joey P. Every four years, he loses two days to this oppressive burden that now involves having no firm obligations for two days and making two phone calls on those days.
This has cost him six days over the past 12 years, if I’m doing my math correctly.
OK, but that’s not the point of fact I was addressing.
So, what it comes down to is ‘they say I have to, therefore I have to’. Got it.
I asked him if he’s ever had to do it…I didn’t ask him if he, as a lawyer, has had to do it. If you ask someone a question do they say always say “Well I, as a [occupation]…” No, because that’s strange. On top of that, even if for some strange reason I was asking him if he was exempt from it for being a lawyer (really, I just wanted to know if he had been through it, if he didn’t have the experience, he has a bit less to say about it), YOU, twice brought lawyers and police officers into it. Why?
Hope you didn’t hurt your brain on that one, I did the math for you upthread, you did, in fact, come to the correct answer.
Wish I could make phone calls. I have one customer who despite my voice mail and my email making it clear I’m on jury duty, had called me twice today and emailed me twice asking me to call his customer because he has some stupid question he wants to ask before buying my product.
I finally had to email my sales manager to ask him to have another sales rep call this idiot because I’m stuck in court.
So, if your going to mock me because I’m stuck in a jury pool with no escape, I’ll be happy to give you the phone number of this customer and you can explain to him what a fun relaxing time I’m having.