While I was not at home, I received a jury summons from Flurm County District Court. On it, the qualifications for jury duty at the court house in Sprungfeld (a town not too far from me, closer than Tirith, the really big city in Flurm County) are listed, one of which is “… 3) is a resident of the county in which he or she has been summoned to serve; …”.
I am not a resident of Flurm County, so it would seem that I am not qualified. But, farther down it says “Special Jury Pool – Gnockle County Jurors Required”, which is my county.
I did not get back home and see the letter until after the date of the summons, so I missed showing up. It was seemed odd that the first day of jury duty was 3:00pm on a Friday.
What kind of weird thing was this? Would it have been a grand jury?
The 3:00 p.m. on a Friday thing might be because they wanted to have perspective jurors fill out a questionnaire, and report back for jury selection on the following Monday.
Most likely it was for a trial that is high-profile and/or expected to last longer than a week, so a larger-than-normal number of people are summoned in expectation that a lot of people either won’t be able to serve or will be excluded during jury selection.
You meant ‘prospective,’ right? Tell me you didn’t mean ‘perspective’ jurors.
To the OP: Your summons is intriguing, and I cannot hazard a guess about the reasons for the strange day/time. That’s the day/time that everyone is trying to get out of the courthouse, not in.
Whatever the reason, you should contact Flurm County District Court Jury Services, explain why you missed your summons and see if they still require your presence. There’s a good chance the clerk in Jury Services with whom you speak can shed some light on the strangeness of your summons. (Please be sure to come back and explain to the rest of us if you find out!)
As someone who conducted jury selection as a clerk in high profile cases that take longer than a week – and I mean cases that run for several months – you don’t start those on a Friday afternoon. You summon hundreds of people, usually the earliest you can in the beginning of the week, and the first thing you do is time-qualify them to ensure they have sufficient time available to serve on a lengthy case. Even that exercise takes an entire half-day per panel. And that’s if you’re pushing hard to get through it. As an example, for the largest, longest case I did, we ran through roughly 1,200 people over an entire week just to time-qualify them. From those 1,200 original jurors summoned, it took us nearly 4 weeks to get a final panel of 12 regular jurors and 6 alternates.
The only thing I can think is you have an overambitious judge in Flurm County District Court who thinks he can time-qualify a panel in 2 hours on a Friday afternoon. I guess you could do it by a show of hands, but that would be… singularly non-traditional.
Questionnaires come after you’ve got everyone time-qualified. You bring them all back and explain how you want the questionnaires completed. We always gave panels a week to complete their questionnaires, not just the weekend. They can be very lengthy and complicated.
My experience is in a state court, not a district court. It may be completely different at their level. Not that different, though, I don’t think. The logistics are much the same. So now I’m really curious, too.
I’ve seen it done both ways. But in my cases, the entire panel gets the questionnaires before they ever seen the inside of the courtroom. And while some are lengthy and complicated, that’s not always the case. I doubt any I’ve seen (and that includes some over 10 pages long) would take more than an hour to complete. I’m betting they asked everyone to come in for a couple of hours on Friday to fill out the form, and spent the weekend agreeing on hardships and other challenges to narrow down the number that would have to be questioned on Monday.
At this point, not surprisingly, no one is answering the phone number listed on the summons. I guess I will not be finding anything out until Monday or later.
That’s interesting. The judges I worked with didn’t see the point of having PJs who couldn’t serve due to time constraints go to the trouble of filling out a questionnaire, but that was just our practice and I can see yours could be an efficient method. My own observation re jury selection and how it is conducted is, it is limited only by the creativity of the judge and lawyers in charge of the process.
I worked on 2 cases where our questionnaires exceeded 20 pages in length. One was a class action civil suit. The other was a high profile death penalty case that we already had to try in a different venue. Fun times.
eschereal, good luck in finding out! Procrustus has probably nailed the reason, though. Ugh; I would hate to work for any judge who wanted to start such an involved proceeding late on a Friday afternoon!
It could be that the jury is for a case that involves someone associated with the Gnockle County Court system.
When I was on Grand Jury, we heard a case from another county because it involved charges against an officer from that county, and they didn’t want to process it through that county’s system.
This way they get a Gnockle County jury but Flurm County judges and staff.
