Yes, I think you should, unless it’s a case that doesn’t involve police such as a civil trial. This is definitely information a judge and attorneys would want to know.
The Death Penalty effectively doesn’t exist in California but I don’t believe in it either so I’d say that and not serve on one of those trials. It was difficult enough ruining some idiots life because he drunkenly battered two women (very minor injuries) in a nightclub.
I live just south of San Luis Obispo and I go there often. We mostly say SLO or San Loo-Iss.
This was in another thread, but I’ll take it up here to avoid a further hijack:
I find it just amazing that being thoughtful and analytical is cause for dismissal from a jury! No wonder OJ got acquitted!
Then there’s this, which is about how in Canada lawyers – or anyone who’s even been to law school – is automatically disqualified from jury duty:
I have heard or read about instances in both American and Canadian courts where the judge instructs the jury on points of law, such as why certain facts are relevant and others are not and why they should not be considered in rendering a verdict. Where there is an option to select a trial by judge or by jury, a defendant and his lawyer will often opt for a judge-only trial where general public perceptions and biases would tend to run against the defendant.
In the sexual assault trial of radio host Jian Ghomeshi in Toronto, for example, the decision to be tried by judge alone was a wise one from his standpoint. The judge, ruling strictly on points of law and the credibility of witnesses, declared Ghomeshi not guilty. Ghomeshi by then had become such a reviled figure that protests broke out over the verdict. But the legal community widely praised the correctness of the judge’s ruling. There is little doubt in my mind how a jury would have decided the case, no matter what instructions the judge gave them.
Okay, on thinking back the S is there in the pronunciation, but quite soft: San Lewees zObispo. I’m also sure I’ve have heard it sans S, but “SLO” just crowds out everything else.
Yeah, i assume i would be dismissed from a death penalty case. I think the death penalty is morally bankrupt, and I’d refuse to vote for it in any situation where it was possible to imprison the perp safely away from potential victims, which is basically all of America. If asked, i would say that. I believe it’s standard to ask potential jurors.
In general, I’m happy to do my civic duty. But not to kill people.
You would. As would I. In order to serve on a death penalty case, jurors must be “death-qualified,” meaning they can contemplate imposing such a punishment. If you can’t, you aren’t qualified to serve.
As previously noted by @hajario, the death penalty has effectively been mooted in California and in many other places. I’m glad.
I’ve been called three times, but only selected once. It was revealed that the trial would have to do with mental illness and a conservatorship, and we were asked in the paperwork about our experience with the mentally ill and about our opinions. I wrote in the opinion portion that I was still pissed off at Ronald Reagan for closing mental institutions, which left mentally ill people to wander and starve in the streets. I figured one or the other of the attorneys would think me too opinionated and get me booted, but that didn’t happen. I had to serve, and we found that the schizophrenic plaintiff woman who had left the institution and was found six months later emaciated and very sick, had to go back to her care home even though she had moved that she wanted to stay out. She took the stand and was barely able to form a coherent sentence. It took us about three hours to find the way we did, because we didn’t want to send her back to the streets to die.
Based on my sample set of the one jury that I served on, I disagree.Personally, before the charges were brought, I was of the opinion that Mr. Ghomeshi was too fond of the sound of his own voice to be an effective host for that radio program and so was predisposed to be unsympathetic to him. However, based on the little bit of media coverage that I heard during the trial I had doubts about the credibility of the main witnesses/complainants. From what I remember of the other people who were in the one jury I served in, I believe that the majority of them would have had the same reaction.
I must have been lucky in the only jury that I’ve served on. The judge was very clear and precise in his final summation and jury instructions, and asked if we needed anything to be explained. He was looking right at me when he asked this, perhaps because I was the only juror who had asked questions during the 13 days of the trial.
I had read the C. K. Chesterton essay referred to by @Northern_Piper in a post above, and I worry that a professional juror would be affected by the same gradual desensitization.
I guess we can disagree on that. Not to digress too much on the Ghomeshi case, but I believe the popular consensus was that, although two witnesses were collaborating in order to “bring down” Ghomeshi, the substance of their testimony about his sexual assaults was substantially true and his proclivities had been well known for many years in the Toronto entertainment community. Their antipathy towards him was because he had sexually assaulted them. This raises at least the decent chance that a jury would have convicted him.
I grant you that some juries have been commended for their scrupulous conscientousness, but many others have acted otherwise. OJ being acquitted (with, incidentally, hardly any jury deliberation) was a national travesty and simply a testament to the ability of high-priced sleazy lawyers to hoodwink jurors, and another travesty is the historical pattern of every Black man who has ever been accused of anything in the Deep South being found guilty by the juries of the time.
I did say that my opinion is based only on my one jury duty experience, and my extrapolation to the Ghomeshi case.
I do agree that there have been many bad verdicts from biased juries in the past and that sadly there will probably be many more.
I would have no problem with defendants being able to choose between a judge, a panel of professional jurors, or twelve peers deciding his case.
I’ve only had to go to the courtroom once, for one day (there was another time that I got an Official Notice in the mail, but that time the process stopped before the point where I’d actually have to go in). It was a civil case involving a car accident, and a physicist was going to serve as an expert witness. When I was asked my profession, I honestly said that I was a physics grad student, but didn’t know the expert witness (he had been in my department, but retired before I came to the school, and I don’t think I’d ever even met him). I ended up being one of the three alternates, and wasn’t needed for the actual trial (I never even heard which way it came out).
If I were ever called up for a criminal trial, I expect I’d probably get passed over for insisting on asking the judge for a numerical value for “beyond a reasonable doubt”. For some reason, most of the folks in our legal system are very resistant to giving such a number, or even think that it’s impossible, while I think that it’s impossible to reasonably answer the question of whether something is a reasonable doubt by any means other than by numbers.
It was a travesty, but not necessarily on the jurors. Best I can determine, he did it, and the police tried to frame him. But once the jury found out about the police framing, that was enough to generate reasonable doubt. Had the cops just played it straight, Simpson probably would have been found guilty.
Here’s a juror story demonstrating how bad this can go when the jurors don’t understand their task:
I once clerked a civil medical malpractice trial. The physician involved wanted to settle the case, acknowledging that he had failed in his duty of care. But the insurance company disagreed, so off to trial we went.
It was a heartbreaking case where the negligence on the part of the doctor resulted in a very young fellow (27) living out his final days as a plaintiff in our case, hoping to win a judgment to help his wife and young family weather the financial storm when he died.
There had been some delay between the initial misdiagnosis and the plaintiff seeking the second opinion that confirmed he was in fact dying, which we – in the privacy of the judge’s chambers – wondered might cause the jury to struggle with the issue of comparative negligence. We were sure that the jury would grasp causation (the initial misdiagnosis), at least.
One of the significant witnesses in the trial was an expert who came to testify on the standard of care. In other words, what would a reasonable physician do in similar circumstances at the time of the misdiagnosis, and had this physician done it (he had not)? The witness was a physician from San Francisco.
After several days of deliberation, the jury rendered its verdict. In favor of the defendant physician and his insurance company. It was surreal for me even reading that verdict aloud, and when the trial was adjourned and we were back in the judge’s chambers, we collectively wept.
We later learned from the attorneys who spoke to the jurors post-trial that the jury centered their verdict on the witness from San Francisco. They decided that the standard of care was higher in San Francisco than it was in our local county. Ummm, wha…??? They were so lost. They didn’t understand causation or comparative negligence, and they surely didn’t understand that a standard of care was the same wherever you are. The whole trial went over their heads.
It would have been a great issue on appeal, but as it was a civil case, it would cost money to appeal the verdict. Money the plaintiff didn’t have.
The plaintiff died the following week. That case haunts me to this day.
The charges in the trial I did jury duty for were second degree murder and manslaughter. We returned a guilty verdict for manslaughter and not guilty for second degree murder. In that particular case there was not doubt that the murder weapon (a kitchen knife with a 10 inch serrated blade) was in the hand of the defendant when it pierced the heart of the victim, but no clear evidence that in the moment the accused meant to kill. If I had been asked to assign percentages to the doubts about these two conclusions it would be 0% for who held the knife and 70% for the intention to kill. For me, in this case, I would have needed enough evidence presented to drop the intention doubt to under 25% before I would have voted for guilty to second degree murder.
is this an example of a miscarriage of justice that would have been prevented by a panel of professional jurors?
Just my opinion, but yes, I believe it would. It’s really important that the people hearing the case understand the terms the judge and lawyers are throwing around. Often they try these matters to a jury as if everyone has a clear understanding of the meanings because they know these terms in their sleep. But in fact, they’re leaving the jury in the dust.
This case was an extreme example of such a misunderstanding with tragic consequences, but it happened more often in trials than I ever wanted to see. Civil litigation in particular has become so complex that it’s hard for juries to follow along.
The first time I was called to jury duty, I’d just moved to another state. I called the number on the letter to tell the clerk or whoever it was that I had moved. I was told they didn’t cover milage for that far away and would take me off the list. Hopefully they did.
the second time, I asked for a deferment. I was scheduled to take a licensing test around the time that I would have been called and didn’t want to miss the test. the several months later when I was off deferment, like so many others on this list, I had to call after 3 pm the day prior to see if I was needed. let’s say my number was group 10. On the last day I called in, they wanted groups 2, 4, 6, 8, and 13 to come in the next day. So I never have been to a jury selection yet.
I served once but have been summoned several times.
The one time I served on a jury, during the voir dire phase, I must have looked confused because the prosecuting attorney asked if I had a question. So I asked, why are we here, since even the defense attorney seems to acknowledge the crime. (The guy was caught literally red-handed, in that he was bent over the body of his estranged wife stabbing her to death with a pair of kitchen shears.) Eventually it became clear that the reason for the trial was to determine if the inevitable conviction would keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
And another thing. At one point, we took a field trip out to the office building that was the scene of the crime. We were shown where he was parked relative to the front door of the office building. The intent was for us to notice that he must have been lying in wait for her to come down to the entrance but they couldn’t tell us that but I was such an idiot, I never connected the dots.
And then we had the evidence, including the murder weapon in the jury room with us, which I didn’t expect. I also didn’t expect to have the entire courtroom rise when we entered but they did.
Also, people tried various excuses to get out of serving. If they said they would not get paid for serving, the judge asked them for the name of their employer, which he wrote down. Not sure if he was going to compare that to a list of employers that they knew paid for jury service or he was planning to encourage the employers to start paying for jury service. And one woman claimed that her English was poor so she wouldn’t be able to understand everything. But one of my fellow jurors said that woman’s English was just fine when my fellow juror met her in the ladies’ room.
And years later, I was one of many, many people brought in for jury selection on another trial. We were warned that this would be a weeks-long trial and people were given the opportunity to request to be excused because of the loss of income. (I couldn’t do that because I knew that my company would pay me as usual.) So after they eliminated those who couldn’t serve, we were finally told the circumstances. The guy was a coach of a boys’ team who was caught giving a blow job to a fourteen-year-old boy. I was really not looking forward to serving on that jury (and really didn’t want the kid to have to testify with the defendant less than twenty feet away). Fortunately, though, the guy took a plea bargain before they selected a jury.
Every time I’ve been called, they tell us that just knowing that there are people in the jury assembly room ready to serve on a jury is often enough to convince the attorneys to come to a deal.
Here, peremptory challenge was reduced sharply and finally eliminated altogether. Voir dire is unusual. The jury is supposed to be a random selection of the citizens, and, yes, lawyers and even judges can be empanelled for the jury. So, unless you’ve got some prior connection to the parties in the case, or are acquainted with a court official, it’s likely you will serve if called.