Actually, no, we pay taxes too. We’re supposed to be paying taxes so that civic necessities can be properly paid for, which means more than $13 a day for people to give up the opportunity to earn an actual income. We need fire engines to have a just society too, but a fire department can’t just call up Spartan and tell them that they’ll be sending over their choicest engine for $13 because it’s not a big sacrifice to save peoples’ homes.
I am always disheartened by the number of people who want to get out of jury duty.
I am always disheartened by the number of people who want to not vote.
IMO:
If you don’t vote you have no business bitching about the leadership.
If you don’t do jury duty, you should not complain about injustice in the legal system.
There are very few jobs that can’t make time for the employee to serve on a jury at some point during the year.
If you are so poor that 1 week off work will put your family in such dire straights that permanent exceptions should be made, then you are too stupid to serve on a jury judging me.
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
I used to think this. But we have the 1st Amendment, so yes, even people that don’t vote or do jury duty have the right to complain about the government and the justice system. And I have the right to tell them to shut their yaps and ignore their stupid opinions.
While there aren’t many jobs that can’t make time for the employee to do jury duty, that doesn’t mean that they all actually do so. Plenty of employers won’t pay anything for folks on jury duty and the courts only pay a pittance. And someone who is highly intelligent can end up in that situation through no fault of their own. You did notice that we just had a huge recession, and most employers didn’t fire folks according to their IQ score. After months off work, any job looks good and people are out of savings are in those dire straits. So maybe you should rethink that last part.
I was on a jury in Missouri this spring. I think we got $6 a day. The judge apologized for the pay rate. He said it had been set years ago (possibly in the 1800’s, don’t remember), and reflected a decent day’s pay.
However, no one had ever been able to convince the state legislature to increase the rate. And in the current no tax environment, it isn’t likely to change any time soon.
I thought I’d jump in here and share my experiences with Jury Duty. Considering that I’d skimmed this thread for tips before going, it’s only fair if I report my findings. My experience was with Seattle superior court, on a criminal (state versus persons) trial, but I’m betting the situation would be similar all over the country, and similar for civil trials.
First off, disclaimer, you shouldn’t ever try to get out of Jury duty dishonestly. It’s not that bad!
When I was there, I found that everyone involved, from the check-in clerks at the desk, to the bailiff, to the attorneys, to the judge… were all incredibly nice people who treated the jurors very well. When you are a juror, you are cared for and coddled, and who wouldn’t want that? Also, if you’re like me and you enjoy sitting in one place with your laptop computer, jury duty involves a lot of that. They had free Wi-Fi, a decent cafe in the building, and tons and tons of time spent sitting around waiting, which was great for me to spend on long sessions of Kerbal Space Program. When you’re required to turn off your phone and laptop and come into the courtroom, the process of the trial is interesting and informative, and you can feel good about doing your civic duty.
With that said, the timing of the notice was bad. I was in a position where I needed critically to be in the office. I had a lot of testing work to do, and our company was trying to ship a product that month. So it was very important to me that I serve either not at all, or as few days as possible. I had already postponed the jury service once already, and though I had one postponement left, I discussed with my manager that I should probably try to serve and get it out of the way now, so that we don’t run into the same problem next year. Still, I wanted to get out of the jury duty because I needed to get that work done.
When you first get the notice in the mail, they will give you options to postpone, or to try to give reasonable cause to get out of the jury duty by mail or by web, without even needing to come into the courthouse. If you have that option, definitely exercise that option. If you go into the courthouse and you get excused in person for a reason that you could have just said on the web form, you’re wasting everyone’s time and taking up a seat in the courtroom that could have helped the odds of someone else who’s already there.
Once the day arrives and you actually go downtown, it works like this: You sit in a big jury assembly room with about 200 other people and wait for them to call your name and a number. In my town, you’ve required to be there in that room for a minimum of two days. If you’re super lucky, your name never gets called. But if it does, as mine was on the morning of day one, you write down the number onto a form which becomes your juror number, and hand the form to the clerk.
For each trial, they randomly pick fifty people to start with. You are part of a group of fifty people that they have to whittle down to 13. If you’re trying to get out of jury duty, those are pretty good odds to start with. I can be one of the 47!
The problem is, if you are excused from your trial right away, you just go back downstairs into the big pool, where you might just get called up again for another courtroom. So it’s actually kind of in your best interests to stick with the questioning process for a while, not that you really have any choice one way or the other. Mine turned out to be two whole days worth of jury selection questions, and I was in there both days, so luckily I didn’t have the experience of getting called up for more than one trial.
Once you’ve turned in your number, they line you up outside the courtroom in numerical order, and give you a big laminated card with the judge’s name and your juror number on it, almost like you’re on a game show. You file into the court, where the judge, the attorneys, and (something that surprised me) the defendants are waiting for you.
The judge does a brief lecture on the process, and makes everyone introduce themselves and say where they live, how many people are in their household, what they do for a living, and what their hobbies are. I found this part tedious, but later it became clear that they wanted to loosen you up for answering questions honestly, and to get you talking about yourself. The judge tells you some vague parts of what the case is about. Not every detail, just the parts that might be relevant. For instance, in this one, he said it was criminal case where the defendants (two very young men) were accused of using a gun or guns to assault someone, with the intent to do great bodily harm. Our job would be to judge whether they had the guns and whether they committed an assault. He didn’t say whether the guns were fired or not, or anything about the type of assault or the situation.
The judge also said how long he expected the case to last: more than two weeks. Ack! I could have spared a few days, but two weeks would just have ruined the job situation for me. I panicked a bit.
Then the questioning of the jury began. If you answer affirmative or maybe to any question, you do so by holding up your laminated card with your juror number on it. The judge and the attorneys all write down your number next to the question. This way they can keep track of which jurors answered which questions affirmatively, and follow up with them if necessary. For instance, I got a follow up on the second day, from a question that I had answered early on the first day, based on my number having been written down and notes taken.
It all started off with the judge asking basic questions which were likely to get you immediately dismissed, the biggest part of which was to read off a list of names associated with the case, including cops, attorneys, witnesses, etc. If you knew the person, you were supposed to hold up your card. There were a few law enforcement officers and/or attorneys in the pool, so they kept holding up their numbers so often it got a couple of laughs.
Another interesting question was, if you were familiar with the location of the alleged crime. It just so happened that I was: I live on that street less than a mile North of the location, and work on that street just a couple miles South of the location.
The judge also asked the basic hardship question. Would serving on this jury be a hardship, if so, what kind? Then they would follow up and give you a chance to explain. This is where it got interesting, because this is the first get-out-of-jury-free card I saw: If you said that you were self-employed and that serving on the jury would cause you financial difficulty because you couldn’t make enough money during that period, then you weren’t asked to come back in the room after the morning break.
By the way, here’s something that you might not know if you’ve never been on Jury duty. They don’t tell you which question got you off. All that happens is, you answer the questions for a couple hours, and then everyone goes on a break (lunch break, afternoon break, etc.) and at the end of the break, some of you are told to report back to the pool instead of reporting back into the courtroom. So although you might not know which questions got certain people off, if you paid real attention and took notes yourself, you could probably figure it out. I didn’t take notes, but the self-employment thing was pretty clear. Also, the juror sitting next to me said that she was an attorney, and the other person in her law firm was out of the country and she was by herself handling cases, and she got off too, right off the top, she was gone after the first break.
Me, not so lucky. I tried to tell the judge that my company was trying to ship a product in the next few weeks and that I was critical to the effort. This was absolutely true, and it was the biggest reason I wanted out of there. I also wasn’t the only person who said it; it’s Seattle after all, there were lots of software developers in the room. I did not have to hide the fact that I wanted out of there, but I did it in a way that was very honest and very clear: I wanted to serve and was happy to serve, but I couldn’t spare the two weeks right now, it would be a hardship. Alas, I did not get dismissed on that first break. It seems that being merely inconvenienced is not really a hardship, and is not a good enough reason. The judge is a very nice person, but he is also strict. Whining doesn’t get you out.
During the first break, I was in fear of actually having to stay there for the whole two weeks. I realized that, even though I wasn’t self-employed, I might have a financial hardship myself. I called my company and asked their policy on how many days they will pay us for jury duty. Turns out that my company pays me even when I’m on jury duty, for the full ride, so that was slightly less worry, though it was one less thing I could use in the courtroom.
After the first break, for the remainder of the next two days, the attorneys, with occasional followups by the judge, all took turns asking us increasingly probing questions about our opinions about guns, the legal system, the Seattle police department, the defendants, crimes in general, whether we were victims of crimes ourselves, etc.
Now here’s where the strategy comes in! Early in the process, the judge quietly mentioned that the attorneys each get a limited number of people that they can excuse for their own reasons. A little thought given to the matter makes you realize: You want to be at the top of the attorney’s hit list. If you’re really lucky, you’ll be at the top of the hit lists of both the defense AND prosecution attorneys, for various reasons. The trick is, the attorneys won’t excuse you immediately. They want to arrange their hit lists carefully, so they won’t start picking people off right away. You’ll spend the whole two days wondering if you’d said the right things to get you excused, even if you were already on the top of their list. You’re going to spend both days worrying. You’ll have trouble sleeping that first night.
The attorneys and judge keep repeating the same concept during the questioning: Is there anything about your feelings about this question that make you think that you could not give these defendants a fair trial? That’s key! And they keep repeating it. If you can honestly say that you have a bias that would make your vote in the case unfair, say so!
Again, I did not need to lie, and you shouldn’t either. I was very lucky with this case because I could be completely honest about my feelings, and those feelings were things that would likely get me excused. Here were some of the ways I answered questions during those two days:
“I have extremely strong feelings about guns. I believe that no one should own them, and that anyone who possesses a gun, legally or illegally, is automatically guilty of a crime.” (Note, I don’t wish to debate handguns in this thread, this is honestly just my feelings on the matter, and it’s what I said in the courtroom.) When pressed, I said that I could not set aside those feelings in the interest of impartiality, if my feelings disagreed with the law or the evidence. I was very clear that the mere presence of guns in the trial would severely bias me against the defendants.
“If I was asked to judge someone based on a law that I thought was a bad law, I would vote with my conscience, not vote with the law. If we were only here to apply some black-and-white law, you wouldn’t need people in these seats. People are here in the jury so that we can judge based on our hearts as to what we think is the correct justice.” This is absolutely true, and I didn’t realize until reading more today, that this is called “Jury Nullification” and it is a real thing. I said this to the attorney in front of the judge, even though the judge had been very clear that his job and our job was to apply the law as it is written, whether we agree with it or not. My statement flew in the face of those instructions, and it was the truth.
“The fact that the crime was committed in my neighborhood would unfairly bias me, making me want the defendants out of my neighborhood, and also would make me fear retaliation.” The judge looked me in the eye and confirmed: “I hear you saying that you would be biased against the defendants because of the desire to clean up your neighborhood, and you would be afraid that someone attached to the defendants would retaliate against you if a guilty verdict were confirmed, is that correct?” And it was. Quite true.
But what I think was most interesting, although maybe not the thing that got me off, was an incredibly nice bone that one of the prosecuting attorneys threw me. On the morning of the second day, she started off her questioning with me specifically. She had written down, early on the day before, that my work situation was a problem and that I couldn’t take two weeks off work without it being a problem. She came straight to me as the first question on the second day and said: “Do you feel as though your work stress, worrying about the job being left undone back at the office, would make you unable to pay attention during the trial, and thus make it impossible for you to give the defendants a fair trial?” “Yes, Ma’am, it would be very difficult for me to pay attention during the trial due to the work stress.”
And that seemed to be the crux of it. Like they had said all along: A fair trial is all they want. Anything that would get in the way of that, would be a reason to put you on their hit list. Whining about how my job is hard? Not helpful. Making them understand that my job stress would make me a bad juror? HELPFUL.
The questioning continued, and though there were some questions which I thought that I could answer, I didn’t raise my card because I didn’t want to spend too much time talking. The attorneys were time-limited, and I didn’t want to monopolize their time (especially when they had been so nice to me). I also didn’t want to seem like I was deliberately trying to be the squeaky wheel. I already thought at that point that I had overdone it a bit with some of my gun comments, so I felt like it was time for me to shut up. If what I’d said so far didn’t get me excused, more talking was just going to dig me farther ON to the jury instead of off of it. Specifically, there were questions about science, such as forensic evidence versus witness testimony, questions about witness credibility, and questions about the Seattle PD and police in general. I could have spouted on endlessly about that stuff without actually adding anything meaningful to the discussion, so I just didn’t raise my card with those questions.
At the end of the questioning process on the second day, we all went on a break, and I was among the people told not to come back into the courtroom: I had been excused. I checked back in at the main jury pool room and waited another couple of hours. Eventually, at some point in the afternoon on the second day, they announced that they would not need any more jurors, and that everyone not assigned to a courtroom was free to go home. Wheeee!
One final note: During the entire jury selection process, race was not mentioned once. The entire room was full of predominantly white Seattleites, and the defendants were both black. The defense attorney tried to get someone to mention race by asking “when you walked into the room this morning, could you automatically tell who the defendants were?” No one took that bait, so the defense attorney didn’t have anything to go on with the race card. Though I could tell what the defense attorney was going for, I found it distasteful, so I’m glad no one went down that road, because it didn’t matter to me, and shouldn’t matter to anyone else.
I recommend that, even if you do have strong feelings about race, don’t make a big deal of it, you don’t want to end up like Juror 799.
I’ve been called for jury duty many times. Usually there’s a 3 year break between calls.
Normally there’s no trials, so I call the line and they say ‘don’t show up’.
Once I was called in and actually made it to the jury room.
A room filled with people you can’t get away from, some of whom don’t have an ‘indoor voice’.
Take a book. A paper one. Our jury room only had a couple of plugs. As a courtesy set your phone on vibrate. There were people with laptops at the table, but they weren’t allowed for safety reasons to plug into the walls from the table (the table was in the middle of the room and the fear was people would trip). We had an accessible bathroom and a water cooler, if you wanted a soda it was a hassle unless you brought it with you. We had to leave purses and phones and computers and whatever in the jury room when we went down to the courtroom. The bailiff or deputy locked the room in our presence.