I’m thinking “it depends”. If the defence case is based on emotional appeal, they will select for emotion over careful thought. If the prosecution case has holes, they will look for people able to see the holes. Of course, the prosecutor probably does the same.
Not quite a scam, but I get so much junk mail about time shares that it can’t be too much money. Plus, they’d send only one letter, not call over and over again.
$1500 pays for a lot of stamps.
Intelligent people can be emotional also. And not logical.
I would be shocked if this is a typical procedure across the country. I literally laughed when I imagined clerks on the DC courts calling no-show jurors. Unimaginable.
Kind of hard to be specific to the OP since there is no mention of locality.
If I got any sort of threatening notice, I’d call the local government office and not the number on the form. I’d let them know what I had received and do as they advise.
But anyhow, in Indiana they send out questionaires around the beginning/end of the year notifying you that you have been selected for the county jury pool. If you don’t get one, you can rest easy knowing you’re not going to be called for the whole year. I guess if we had a big event like Aurora, Co or the Boston Bombing, then there might be a special circumstance if they required thousands of prospective jurors.
My spouse, who is disabled, got selected a couple of years ago and did not want to go. I would be glad to be selected, but never have been. I helped him fill out the answers, and I made sure under hobbies to list that he liked watching TV, especially shows like Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, and Law & Order SVU. I figured that might make him appear to be eager to act like he knew more about legal affairs then he really did, and you wouldn’t want that on a jury.
Secondly, they ask if you have ever been the plaintiff or defendant in a civil action, so I made sure to list those, even the ones from 25 years ago that involved his business. They might seem irrelevant or forgotten, but mentioning them might make an officer of the court think that you are biased and are going to be prejudiced one way or the other. I wouldn’t make these up, in case they get specific, but do mention them if you have them and want out of service.
I think they also asked about your feelings concerning law enforcement officers, and depending on the question you can usually phrase a response that indicates a little bit of bias about your perception of them. Either that they are apt to lie and get away with it, or go the other way and state that you think their testimony is unimpeachable and always more valuable than anyone else’s.
Lastly, I made sure to mention volunteering for certain political candidates and parties, again a nice bias that at least one party wouldn’t want in the jury box.
The man knows what he’s talking about. He’s served on a lot of juries.
I have seen reports of dozens of these scams in my jurisdiction. Not once was there anything mailed to the house. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t or couldn’t happen.
ETA: The way these scams work is to get someone vulnerable who panics and pays. They don’t want to give you time to think about it or ask others about it. Being on the phone with Deputy Jones doesn’t give you a chance to consult anyone. If someone gets something in the mail they are more likely to show it to their grandson to help figure it out.
I ignored a jury summons once. I was in the middle of something big at work, and I think when I read the summons I got disgusted and accidentally put it in the pile of junk mail to throw away.
I never heard a peep from the court. Unless they send it return receipt requested, how can they ever prove you received the notice in the first place?
(Yes, I did do my civic duty by previously serving on a federal court case for blackmail, dirty photos and embarrassing testimony included. We found the guy guilty in about an hour.)
I’d bet it has little to do with the cost of a mailing.
It has everything to do with US Postal Service regulations about mail fraud - my google-fu is weak this morning, but I’ve read on a number of occasions in the past that fraudsters avoid the US Postal Service because sending something through the mail exposes them to another charge entirely (beyond the main scam).
Ivylass: It’s quite possible, depending on how your jurisdiction works, that the summons was along the lines of “call the night before to see if you need to show up”. My county does that. I was supposed to call the night before, two Thursdays (or whatever) in a row. I was told the first time that I wasn’t needed. The second time, I forgot to call until halfway through the next day (oops!). Fortunately, I wasn’t needed then either!!
I seem to remember they were trying to seat a jury for a rather high-profile child murder case that had been moved out of the jurisdiction due to publicity. The summons mentioned something along the lines of a “murder trial” that could take “weeks.” From what I heard on the news, they weren’t able to seat a jury in my county either…it was that bad. Basically, a convicted child molestor, who hadn’t registered when he moved, snuck into his neighbor’s trailer, kidnapped the young girl, raped her, then buried her alive.
I’ll go out a limb here and say that judge was an egotistical moron.
Similarly, I got a jury summons in the mail and it got thrown out. As in thrown in the garbage. Not by ME of course, but it got thrown out. I did receive a notice later on saying that I had been sent a notice and that I could face a fine if I didn’t comply (that notice had a new date on it) and that too got thrown out. As in the garbage. Again, not by ME of course. I never heard anything from them again. No fines, no nothing. Not another peep. This was a few years ago.
No, I take that back. I just got one about six months ago too - just a regular jury summons - and I put it in the pocket of one of my pairs of jeans and promptly forgot about it. I remembered it when I did the laundry and found the little bits and pieces of it in the dryer afterwards. Haven’t heard anything since.
While this may be the messed up way WE roll in my family, I wouldn’t necessarily take it as advice - I live in Cook County, IL and frankly, our court systems are far too busy to do anything about a missed jury duty notice no matter how many nastygrams they send out via computer. So I really couldn’t have cared less.
And yes, I did serve on a jury in the past when I was younger and had the time and inclination, so I’ve done my civic duty so please don’t get in my face about that. 
We must have a better class of people in Alameda County. The clerk reads the names, and there are well under 5% no responses. When someone called does not show up in the courtroom, the judge gets reasonably upset.
The court is in Oakland, not out in the sticks, so it is not totally suburban versus urban. I can imagine New York being the same as DC, though.
Maybe it’s different in your neck of the woods but in all of the jury summons I’ve received (Illinois and both Alameda and Contra Costa counties here in the SF Bay Area), not once has there ever been mention of what kind of case you might wind up on. It just says “Please report to court X on date Y for jury duty”. They’re just gathering a big pool of potential jurors - you might wind up on a boring, minor criminal case or it could be the sort of horror story you reference.
To the OP, that sounds extremely dodgy. Yes if you ignore a legitimate jury summons you might be subject to a penalty (contempt of court or something) but a legit summons will tell you which court to appear in, when and who to contact if you can’t appear. Look up the courthouse phone number (confirm it’s what you were sent) and call them yourself.
“Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?”
Yeah, every jury summons I’ve ever got (something like 5-6), says what court, what judge, when, and where to show up. There’s also a laundry list of exemptions that you might automatically qualify for. For example, if you’re the sole caregiver for a child under a certain age, or for a disabled person, they’ll let you off the hook automatically.
Here’s the list- apparently medical conditions require a doctor’s note.
They don’t tell you what kind of case you’ll be on though, although the actual court in question does give some insight, based on the jurisdiction of the court (e.g. municipal court likely means traffic ticket, family law courts probably means child custody, civil court means a civil case, criminal court means some kind of criminal court, etc… )
True, but I’ve been up for two murder cases (one capital punishment qualified) and the difference was that the jury pool for them was much, much bigger than than the pools for a civil case or a minor criminal case. But the summons definitely does not say anything - you get it so far in advance that they couldn’t possibly know even if they wanted to tell you for some reason.
The times I’ve been called, they don’t even say that much. Only the date, time, and courthouse, not which courtroom.
Everybody shows up and assembled in the main Jury Room. This is a large room, seating a few hundred people. At this stage, nobody is assigned to a case yet. We all just sit there and wait. Then, whenever a judge in any courtroom needs to assemble a jury for a trial, he calls down to the officials in the commissioner’s office (adjacent to the Main Jury Room), and they select a few dozen people to send up to the courtroom for further jury selection there.
No nobody knows in advance what kind of a case they might be on.
ETA: If you get as far as the jury selection process in the courtroom but don’t end up on the case, you might be sent back to the Main Jury Room, where you might be called to another case. You have to sit there a whole week, or until you get on a case. OR, after you don’t get on a case, they might send you home and say you’ve fulfilled your duty for the year. There was some specific rule for which they would do. Of course, all the courts had the phone-the-night-before system, so many people who got the summons never have to show up at all.