I’ve told this story on SDMB before, but not sure if it was in this thread. If you haven’t read it before, some here may find it interesting.
It is May, 2003, and my wife is something like in her 40th week of pregnancy. She is just about to pop. On Monday (I think), she received a municipal jury summons (small town in Texas) to appear on the following Thursday for jury service. This conflicted with her planned OB/GYN appointment for that week. (At this point, she was seeing the doctor once per week. The doctor’s office was in west Austin, about an hour and fifteen minutes from us. I also want to note here that the birth was planned to be a cesarean delivery. The doctor liked to schedule her surgeries for Fridays. My wife was anemic and experiencing other discomforts and problems. The doctor appointment was for Thursday. I fully expected that the doctor would admit her to the hospital and we would have a baby on Friday. No doctor told me that – it was just a hunch I had.)
On Tuesday, my wife went to the municipal judge’s private law practice to request a reschedule of her service. She was very obviously pregnant and she had already contacted her doctor for documentation of the excuse. The judge wouldn’t hear it. He threatened her with arrest if she failed to appear as ordered. My wife was hysterical. She rescheduled her doctor appointment for the following Monday. Read that again: THE MUNICIPAL JUDGE THREATENED TO THROW MY PREGNANT WIFE IN JAIL!
On Thursday, my wife appeared for jury service as ordered. She was not even offered a chair in which to sit. She stood in a crowded room with other prospective jurors. At one point, the defendant was paraded in front of the jury pool. The prospective jurors were then allowed to discuss among themselves what they each knew about the ne’er-do-well defendant (it’s a small town). The defendant pled out and no jury was empaneled. My wife requested documentation from the clerk for her employer. She was given a hand-scrawled note torn from a spiral notebook. It reminded me of a hall pass I might write a student at school.
By Friday, I was absolutely livid. I met with the mayor Friday morning (she was also a teacher in the school where I worked). I showed her the scrawled note and told her the story I just told you. I managed somehow to remain calm, but it was not easy.
Saturday and Sunday were mostly calm, though my wife was very uncomfortable in the late stage of pregnancy. At some point Sunday night or Monday morning, my wife reported that she could not feel the baby move. In the wee hours of Monday morning, we raced to the hospital in Austin where we had done our pre-admitting, etc. The baby was dead.
There is more, but that is the end of the part that relates to jury duty.
That municipal judge retired about a year ago. Twenty years later, my wife has a panic attack when we see him around town. I do not waste space in my head or heart for hate, but that man can burn in Hell for all I care.
. But that last bit is where the jury system falls down. There needs to be a federal law mandating employers pay employees for some minimum of jury service with the feds/states picking up the tab when it runs over that.
), neither my wife nor I received a municipal jury summons for more than a decade. When I finally did get such a summons, I told the city attorney that I would not sit on any jury empaneled by that judge. She could either excuse me outside of court or I could declare in exquisite detail in court why I would not serve. That ended that jury service.