Last week, I received a summons to appear for jury duty at the Superior Court of Santa Clara. I don’t want to attend.
I have spent the last week emailing back and forth with the jury staff of The Court and they claim that unless I write the court a letter making a sufficient case for why I cannot attend, I face a $1500 fine or 5 days of incarceration.
My question is:
What if I just tell them to shove it?
Possibly relevant facts:
[ol]
[li]I am not a US citizen[/li][li]I do not live in the USA[/li][/ol]
Backstory: I used to live in Santa Clara but moved to the UK about a year ago. The court has a website where you explain why you should not eligible for jury duty (i think I have a good case!) but, as I discovered after several days interacting with The Jury Staff, the site is blocked to people outside the USA. The Jury Staff now insist that I MUST write a letter or face punishment. I suggested that this was more their problem than my problem and that they should deal with it.
I have now figured out how to get to their website by spoofing my location (possibly breaking several federal laws in the process) but now I am really curious. What would happen if I just told them to shove it in the first place?
Since you aren’t a US citizen and aren’t in the US, nothing will happen to you now - they aren’t going issue a warrant and come to your residence to arrest you , as might happen if you still lived in Santa Clara. I suppose if they issue a warrant that might prevent you from entering the US in the future. I’m surprised you got the notice, as I don’t think they normally get forwarded.
This is a bit of a hijack - but why would you spend a week going back and forth over email and however long it took to figure out how to spoof your location rather than five minutes writing a letter?
It’s a moot point now. But you messed up by contacting them.
Next time just don’t respond to the summons at all. And if they say anything (which they probably won’t), just say you never got the summons in the mail.
Yeah, just write the dang letter and state that you aren’t a US citizen and that you don’t reside in Santa Clara County. According to the Santa Clara County website, both of those facts disqualify you from jury service:
[quote]
You may be called to serve unless you do not qualify for one or more of the following reasons: [ul]
[li] You are not a United States citizen;[/li][li] You are under 18 years of age;[/li][li] You are not a resident of Santa Clara County;[/li][li] You do not have sufficient knowledge of the English language to act as a trial juror;[/li][li] You have been convicted of a felony or malfeasance in office and your rights have not been restored;[/li][li] You are currently serving as a grand or trial juror in any court of this state;[/li][li] You are the subject of a conservatorship; or[/li][li] Active duty peace officers (PC830.1, PC 830.2(a), PC 830.33(a)) may also be excused from jury service.[/ul][/li][/quote]
For the first four or five goes around, I was inclined to do the right thing and let them know that they had made a mistake. I was unfailingly polite. It was in about the sixth iteration that they told me that I must write a letter to be excused with a threat of punishment if I did not. My final reply, though still impeccably polite, showed a little less respect for the Majesty of the Law.
I have a long-standing belief that people of goodwill usually want to do the right thing if it does not cause them too much inconvenience. It did make me angry that it was easier for them to tell me to write a letter (£6 for a registered letter from the UK to the USA) than to print out my email and put it in the same pile where they would have put my expensive letter.
That was the point where I climbed up on my high horse (unwisely, perhaps, but justified, I thought) and objected to the very fact that they were threatening me with punishment if I did not spend my money to help them correct their mistake.
I have a lot of sympathy for lowly folks in bureaucracies who are just following orders. But how hard would it be to turn around to a supervisor and say “Whoops! We made a mistake here, boss. How can we fix it for him?” The fact that I know that the answer is “Very hard indeed” because bureaucracies do not have that ability actually makes me even more annoyed.
FWIW It took several goes around to figure out that I was actually blocked from the website. The message my browser displayed was “This website cannot be reached”. As far as I was concerned I was doing them a favour by letting them know that their website was down. I was communicating separately with their IT folks and their Jury Staff.
Once I realized that I was blocked because I was outside the USA, it took just a few minutes to find a solution. Now I’m just amused and curious.
I’ve found that this varies literally from one jurisdiction to another. Once, I was called to appear at Daley Plaza and chose to ignore the notice. My plan was to say, if necessary, that I never received it. Since the notice was sent by regular mail and not signed for, I figured it would work. I never heard from them again, so I thought it did work.
Three or four years later, I did the same thing, but I received a second notice warning me that I would face repercussions if I didn’t show up. I decided not to test my theory further. LOL
Most places use a variety of sources, including vehicle registrations, tax records, and others. It’s possible to be called for jury duty without being registered to vote.
I’d like to believe that, somewhere along the line, someone in the bureaucracy would say “Wait a minute! Why are we are issuing a warrant against someone who doesn’t even live in this country?”
I’m not sure they would though. In my most feverish imagination, I imagine being detained at SFO on my next visit then, after several days in the county jail, listening to an exasperated Judge dismiss the case with 'Why is this man here?" before demanding that the court review and reform its procedures.
Probably won’t happen. But it could though, right? I’ve watched “The Night Of…”.
As a thought experiment, how much would you be willing to spend if, say, a court in London sent you a summons to appear for jury duty? It was an honest mistake, and you tried your best to fix it but now they’ve threaten to arrest you if you don’t comply.
I seriously doubt anything would come of it, even if they know of your existence. It takes resources to go after people, and it would be absurd to go after someone for not responding to a summons when in all likelihood there’s a valid reason you’re not able to do jury duty.
If you’re caught lying about your reasons for not doing jury duty, or if you’re willfully refusing to do jury duty, then that’s probably a different matter. But both are usually hard to prove.
This explains what is likely to happen. I’ve been called for jury duty several times, each time there were people who didn’t show up, and I’m sure that happens every day, and I doubt much more happens than sending out another letter. As it is they appear to bring in at least 10 people for every potential spot to be filled, and easily half of those juries won’t be used once impaneled as settlements and plea bargains are reached. I certainly hope the state and federal government don’t spend a lot of my tax dollars tracking down these people who don’t show up.
Send a letter signed in ink and keep proof of service along with a copy of it. That will help if you either find you yourself residing there again, or find yourself on a terrorist list.
To compensate yourself for having to deal with such an embuggerance, treat yourself to a screening of “Brazil.”
Send a letter (an actual, written, letter, not an email) to the US ambassador in your country detailing the facts you’ve presented, your lack of success in this matter, and ask her if she (well, one of her staff) could impose upon the Superior Court of Santa Clara to register that you are currently ineligible.
You’ve made a mistake that many who deal with bureaucracies make, namely that the people who you are interacting with know anything about your earlier interactions (or even care). In all likelihood, they do not know anything about previous communications and don’t care to the point that if you insist on telling them, they just tune you out. All that is irrelevant.
What they (each individual person you deal with, not the staff) consider relevant is to give you accurate and truthful answers to your current questions.
-I received a summons for jury duty in your court, but I am not a citizen nor do I reside in your jurisdiction. What should I do?
–If you cannot comply with the court summons you must write a letter to the Court explaining your reasons.
-But, I’m not a citizen of your country and I don’t live in your jurisdiction.
–If you cannot comply with the court summons you must write a letter to the Court explaining your reasons. That is explained in the summons you received.
-What if I don’t write a letter and just ignore it.
–If you don’t comply with the summons, you are subject to a $1500 fine and/or 5 days imprisonment. You can avoid this by simply writing a letter to the Court explaining the reasons you feel you should be excused.
Now, the court staff gets a lot of people who try to get out of jury duty. They cannot dismiss you, only a Judge can. Many people will lie to get out of jury duty. When forced to put their lies in writing to a Judge, many of these people will decide that lying to a Judge is not in their best interests and comply with the summons.
If you had just ignored the summons when you received it, nothing would happen since, as has been noted, they can’t prove you actually received the summons. However, since you have contacted them concerning it, they have a record that you received it, so if you ignore it now, a bench warrant may be issued that is enforceable within the jurisdiction of the court. I think the bench warrant may expire after a certain amount of time, so that you don’t have to worry about it if you are visiting Santa Clara ten years from now, but if you visit there this winter and get pulled over for speeding, it might come up. Chances are, if you can prove you were not a citizen of the US when the warrant was issued (simply writing a letter to the Court may suffice for this), the warrant will probably be dropped.