Jury Duty - what's it like?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been called to duty (my first time) in US District Court.

I have to call on the 31st to see if I have to go in on the 3rd. I’m on call from April 3rd until June 2nd. I’ve submitted my excuse request (I’m getting married and going on a honeymoon in May and I’m not missing that for Jury Duty) and my juror info card.

I hope I don’t have to go as it’s a 80+ mile round trip to the courthouse, and I’d have to leave my house by 6 or 6:30 am to get there in time. Sigh. At least I get mileage and $40 a day, which, sadly, is more than I’d be making busting my butt at the grocery store.

However, if I do have to go, I want to be prepared. I’ve been reading various threads on jury duty, but I’m very nervous in new situations, so I’d like some stories of your jury experiences.

I don’t mind serving, but I do mind driving a hour and a half in rush hour traffic to a bad-ish part of town I’ve never been to, to go sit in a room and probably not get picked.

What do I take to pass the time, anyway? Books? Puzzle magazines? Narcotics? :smiley: I assume that there will be a lot of waiting around, as this is, after all, a government operation, and a big one at that. Electronic devices are prohibited, so I guess I’ll leave my books on tape at home.

So, regale me with your stories. Please?

2

Oh, I forgot to add:

What do I wear?

3

Do you want to get selected, or not? :smiley:

4

I don’t know. About two years ago I had jury duty in Manhattan. I checked in, and they told me to wait until my name was called. I sat in a room with a few hundred other people for two days, no one ever called my name, and then they told me I could go home.

5

I want to be comfortable. :slight_smile:

6

Jury duty is a bunch of hurry up and wait. However, if you do get selected for a jury, it’s quite interesting. I’ve served a few times and I always kind of look forward to it. You meet new and interesting people (the others in the potential juror pool) and you get to see how the court system works. The only downside is coming back to work to face overfull e-mail boxes and inboxes.

To be honest, I’ve sat on a few nasty cases, but I always felt I did the best I could given the evidence at hand. Dont’ worry, the instructions are explicit, and the court staff are always happy to answer questions.

I don’t know how your system works, but honestly, it sounds like you’ve got a legitimate excuse for being excused from jury duty. They’ll probably just defer it until a later time.

Best of luck to you.

7

Heh. I hope they defer it. I’m leaving the state in a few months. :smiley:

I honestly don’t mind serving, but I hope it’s not a murder trial. I don’t know if I could handle that. Though, the forensic evidence part of it is really fascinating.

8

If you do get selected, odds are it will be way more boring then that. May not even be a criminal trial.

9

Don’t dress too nice. I made that mistake and ended up as foreman. Everyone else was in jeans, and I had on nice wool trousers and a sweater.

10

As for what to wear, when I got called, we were told to dress … something. “Business Casual,” maybe. I know it said no tank tops or ripped jeans.
I’ve gotten a jury summons about 3 or 4 times, but only had to report once. Here, you call a phone number the night before and if the number printed on your summons is listed, you have to report the next day.
Anyway, no electronic devices are allowed, and the summons said to bring reading material, so definitely take something to read.
After we all got checked in, they played a short video about why serving was so important. It had a couple of Hollywood stars in it, but I can’t remember who they were now.
After that, we were left to our own devices. I was amazed at how many people had showed up with nothing to do. A few had brought the paper, but that only lasts so long.
I was reading Bill Bryson’s “A Walk In The Woods” and had to keep myself from laughing out loud a couple of times.
We were all dismissed at noon - I got paid $15 to sit and read all morning. IIRC, that excuses me from being called again for three years, and I think it was about three years ago, so I’ll probably get called again soon. My husband’s never been called.

11

I’ve been called to Jury Duty FOUR times, and it was the same thing each time.
Bring something to read and find somebody to talk with.
Jury Duty (for me anyway) was wait, wait, wait with an occasional jaunt to a court room to wait some more, and if I was chosen to serve on a jury, we’d wait in the Jury Room, where many times we’d be told that they’d settled the case, so we’d be sent back to the main jury waiting area and wait some more.
Also, bring a lunch or some lunch money.

12

I see we live in the same county. I’ve been called three times. All of them were for Superior Court. The last time was last fall and in my two week term, I sat on three cases. All were criminal. It’s like that for every time I serve. I don’t know why. I answer questions honestly and probably a bit too bluntly, but for whatever reason, I always get chosen. Doesn’t matter to me, it makes the time go by faster.

13

You’ve been given good advice so far; bring a book or two, dress comfortably (although I’d recommend more than jeans, less than a suit – something that you feel comfortable in that demonstrates a respect for the judicial system).

In case it matters to you and you make it as far as voir dire, there are a couple of different ways that a jury can be seated. Generally, a juror can be struck “for cause” or a party can use a “peremptory” challenge to strike a juror. Being struck for cause means that the party striking you as a juror has a legally valid reason – you are related to one of the parties, for example, or you’ve answered a question in a particular way (i.e., it’s a car accident case and you were in a car accident last week). A peremptory challenge can be used to strike a juror without cause – essentially, the lawyer for one side or the other doesn’t like the cut of your coat. Of course, a peremptory challenge cannot be used to strike you for an illegal reason – race or gender are primary examples (a so-called Batson violation).

So those are the two bases for striking a juror. Each side gets an unlimited number of strikes for cause (which makes sense; the judge rules whether the “cause” alleged is sufficient to justify striking the juror, so the system doesn’t get abused), but each side usually is limited in the number of peremptory challenges it can use. If the number the judge permits is three peremptory challenges (which isn’t atypical), you have to use them wisely.

Many courts use what is called the “Arizona method” of selecting a jury. If the jury size for trial should be 12 jurors with 2 alternates, and each side has 3 peremptories, the judge will seat 20 people in the jury box for voir dire (12+2+3+3). The judge will then ask questions of the jury. At the end, each side will approach the judge with their list of jurors they want excused for cause, and those they want to challenge peremptorily.

What some judges will do is permit each side to go one by one, announcing which jurors they want to strike. You can see how this would prolong jury selection: if the plaintiff strikes juror 3, and the defense also planned to strike juror 3, once the plaintiff announces he wants juror 3 striken, the defense will go to its second choice. You could conceivably exercise all 6 peremptory challenges. Since there may also be challenges for cause in the group, additional jurors may need to be seated and voir dired.

What most judges I have seen will do, then, is to essentially require a secret ballot: each side writes down their peremptory challenges, and never knows who the other side wrote down. The judge simply reviews the lists and announces which jurors are striken. As lawyers, of course, we dislike this method because it means that we have had to “waste” a peremptory on someone the other side wants to strike.

Anyway, the “science” of jury selection is fascinating to me. I’m sorry to say that I’ve never been called for jury duty. Odds are good, of course, that I’d never get on a jury, but just being able to see it from the other side of the bar would be interesting.

14

Serving on a jury is one of the most enlightening experiences a citizen can have. The odds are long and there’s no use trying to improve them, but if your number is up and you get selected, I don’t think you’ll regret it.

I’ve been called many times over the years, and served on several juries. Each was unique, but every one was impressive to me. At least here in the US, the process is fascinating and ultimately quite uplifting.

Two years ago I was called, part of a pool of nearly 300 candidates for a criminal trial involving the killing of an on-duty police officer. If convicted, the penalty phase would therefore require the jury to determine if the death penalty (CA) would be imposed.

For six months, I went to frequent jury screening exercises. I filled out a 50 page questionaire, in which I described in detail me experiences with the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, where I’d lived for a couple of years.

Much to my surprise, I was place on the jury. Unfortunately, during the course of the six-month selection process my circumstances had changed materially, and I had to petition the court to excuse me (which they did). But it’s too bad, I would have gained considerably from the challenge of being saddled with the task of deciding a person’s mortal destiny. Very real.

15

I just served on a jury for a first-degree murder trial, lasting a couple of weeks. It was really interesting just to see how the court operated, since my only previous exposure to the judicial system was television shows and movies. Fortunately for me, the county Superior Court is less than a mile from home, so the travel was not a major inconvenience.

The judge immediately excused anyone for whom serving on the jury represented a financial hardship (compensation was only $15 per day) or who was personally responsible for someone’s care. So a stay-at-home mother or person taking care of an elderly parent was excused immediately while an older woman taking care of her grandchildren was not. Inconvenience to third parties, such as employers, was not a legitimate excuse. Since my company fully paid me during jury service, I didn’t get excused.

As for the trial itself, we found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of lying in wait in the death of his estranged wife. He is to be sentenced next week, and is expected to get life in prison without the possibility of parole.

16

That’s interesting. Here in Canada, the judge only determines challenges for cause based on irregularities in the documents summoning the jury array (e.g. - that a proposed juror’s name isn’t on the list). All the other types of challenge for cause (the main one being bias of some sort: that a juror “is not indifferent between the Queen and the accused”) are determined by a mini-jury of two - the last two jurors sworn before the challenge to a proposed juror hear the challenge and decide if the juror should be dismissed.

Lawyers can sit on juries in the States? In Canada, lawyers are ineligible for jury service.

17

I regret telling the other jurors that I thought OJ looked ‘trustworthy’. My bad.

18

Campion, do you have “talesmen jurors” in your state, or federally?

Here, if the jury array is exhausted because of the number of challenges for cause, the judge can instruct the sheriff to go out and haul people in off the street for jury duty. Jurors summoned that way are called “talesmen” jurors.

It is a bit spooky that you can be going about your business, just coming out of a mall, and the sheriff walks up to you and puts you on the bus for the court: “Congratulations! You’ve just won a chance to sit on a jury for three weeks! Leave your groceries in your car, and come along.”

19

I’ve been summed 3 times. Twice my number came up and I sat on the jury.

The last time I was elected to be the jury foreman.

Here’s how it works where I live. Central Colorado.

Me: “So, they told us to elect a Jury Forman.”

The rest of the folks: “Um yeh”

I had no intention of leading this group of sheep but someone had to say something.

Me:”Any volunteers”

Them: “foot shuffeling”

Me:”OK, could we draw straws? We have a lot to discuse and we don’t want to waste time figuring out who is in ‘charge’ or the foreman of this jury. No one wants the job, how about we draw straws?

[sub]enipla looks for straws, coffer stirrers, anything. Their aren’t any. We have coffee, but nothing to stir it with[/sub]

Ok says I. How about we all put our names on a piece of paper wad them up and pick one?

The sheep :You’re our foreman because you thought about how to pick a foreman.

Enipla : :smack:

20

No, lawyers are eligible for service. And, much to my mother’s surprise, mothers of lawyers also may serve. :wink:

True-ish story: one of my colleagues was called for jury duty. The plaintiff’s lawyer had been opposing counsel on another case. He therefore asked the judge to excuse my colleague for cause (bias) because of their prior experience. The judge turned to my colleague, asked, “Can you be fair?” to which my colleague of course replied, “Yes.” There, said the judge. He’s not biased, he’s fair. And since the lawyer was out of peremptories, my colleague was seated on the jury.

My friend Mr. Google assures me that we do. I found a Maine statute, statutes from Nevada and Mississippi, and I also remember reading a North Carolina news story, where on the day before Thanksgiving, the judge told the sherriff “get more jurors!” The sheriff went to Walmart and took shoppers back to court with him. Brouhaha ensued. There is apparently nothing more vicious than a thwarted Christmas shopper.

I imagine that finding a sufficient jury is a problem in rural areas, and pulling talesman jurors may be needed more there. California has shifted to a “one day, one trial” jury system. Jurors must either show up for a day (and not get seated) or serve on one trial. Having done so, they will not be called for a year. This has created a bit of a crunch in terms of getting enough jurors, because the court is loathe to call in more jurors than will be needed, since once a juror is called in, he cannot be called again for a year. So in areas where juror turnout is low, or where the jury pool itself is small, “one day one trial” can be a problem. I imagine that pulling in talesman jurors could also be a problem, since the sheriff would have to ascertain when they last served so as not to bring them in in violation of the “one day one trial” twelve month rule.

enipla, that cracked me up!