What would happen if I simply refuse to show up for jury duty?

[hajario]

I always comply but a lot of people that I know don’t. My part of the county gets a healthy response so they don’t care about the no shows, many of whom have legitimately left the area like the OP. If you don’t want to go, the best bet is to toss the notice in the trash. Once you make contact, you have drastically increased the chances that you will get in trouble but it’s still pretty remote.

[engineer_comp_geek]

In the county where I live in Pennsylvania, they get names from a variety of sources (basically any type of record that the county has access to). You don’t have to be a registered voter to get called for jury duty.

If you don’t show up, they call your home. If they don’t get a hold of you, they send a police cruiser to your house. If they can’t find you, the judge issues a warrant for your arrest, which stays in the system. (Cite - one of the bailiffs from the courthouse when I served on jury duty and someone asked what happens to people who don’t show up)

I’m not sure that anyone at any stage along the line would bother to check to see if you are actually a U.S. citizen or not, so I’m not sure how the OP’s scenario would actually play out around here. I think it’s fairly obvious that if you did return to here and got arrested, once you told the judge that you weren’t a citizen and were out of the country they’d dismiss the case and let you go, but it might actually take getting to that point before your citizenship is even looked at.

[Lord_Feldon]

@engineer_comp_geek

If you don’t show up, they call your home. If they don’t get a hold of you, they send a police cruiser to your house. If they can’t find you, the judge issues a warrant for your arrest, which stays in the system. (Cite - one of the bailiffs from the courthouse when I served on jury duty and someone asked what happens to people who don’t show up)

I’m sure this happens occasionally, like when the judge arrives to find that ten people have shown up to fill twelve chairs and decides to make an example of some people, but unless it’s an extremely rural area, it would be really infeasible to do it every time someone fails to respond.

[Hermitian]

My take on this:

They have this rule for two reason:

1. People don’t want to show up for jury duty.
2. Because people are filthy liars.

If Jim Bob calls the jury summons lady and he finds out that all he needs to do is send an email (from horny-dude-84@aol.com of course) to the jury summons lady and say he is out the country, then why wouldn’t he? Word would get out. This tactic would be frequently used.

However, most people are not as comfortable typing out a letter (on paper) and signing their name at the bottom saying that they are out of the country. It is basically weeds out people from attempting to get out of jury duty.

[engineer_comp_geek]

@Lord_Feldon

I’m sure this is theoretically possible, and even happens occasionally when the judge arrives to find ten people have shown up to fill twelve chairs, but unless it’s an extremely rural area, it would be really infeasible to do it every time someone fails to respond.

This is how they do it in our county.

You get a paper saying you need to report to jury duty, along with a form to fill out and send in. You show up, stand in a long line, show them your license, and go into a big room. They typically call a couple hundred people in at a time. You serve all week.

You are given a number. Periodically, they’ll call out a bunch of numbers. If they call your number, you go with that group and go up to the courtroom. The prosecutor and defense ask questions and whittle away at the group until there are twelve left. Everyone else goes back to the main room. Even if you serve as one of the 12, if your case ends before Friday, you go back to the main room.

Numbers are chosen at random. You could theoretically be called up for a different case every day, or you might never be called. There were a few that served twice while I was there. I didn’t get called up until Thursday.

Out of a group of a couple hundred, only a small handful don’t show up (if 5 percent don’t show up, which I think would be a bit high, that’s only about 10 people). It probably only takes a few minutes for the judge to issue the warrants, and I’m guessing a couple of police cruisers could drive around to all of those homes probably before noon. It seems pretty feasible to me.

This wouldn’t work in a large city, obviously.

[kenobi_65]

@Hermitian

If Jim Bob calls the jury summons lady and he finds out that all he needs to do is send an email (from horny-dude-84@aol.com of course) to the jury summons lady and say he is out the country, then why wouldn’t he? Word would get out. This tactic would be frequently used.

And, I’d get really tired of getting email replies from the jury summons lady on my AOL address.

[Lord_Feldon]

@engineer_comp_geek

Out of a group of a couple hundred, only a small handful don’t show up (if 5 percent don’t show up, which I think would be a bit high, that’s only about 10 people).

I’m sure response rates vary by area, but 5% seems really low to me. The anecdotes I’m finding have a lot of courts that are counting themselves lucky to get response rates above 50%. And how do they separate no-shows from their data being junk? Imposing massive consequences on people because some court system’s shitty computer still has a five year old address sounds less than ideal.

[Cheesesteak]

@kevlaw

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.

If I ever intended to go back to the UK, I’d probably spend 5 minutes writing a letter, and a dollar to mail it out.

It’s a better use of my time than dealing with multiple emails to people who can’t actually help me.

[kevlaw]

@excavating_for_a_mind

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.

No doubt.

Part of my problem is that I’m an idealist and I think problems like this should be solvable if only people cared a little more. Might be a Silicon Valley thing.

The other part of my problem is that I am indeed very bad at dealing with bureaucracies and find it very stressful. I envy all you people who can just say “Pshawww! just ignore the law! They’ll never find you!” I’m not able to do that.

Whenever I have a run-in with a bureaucracy I go through phases of

[ol]
[li]This should be easy to fix.[/li][li]This is so unfair.[/li][li]Their incompetence/apathy is making me angry.[/li][li]Surely, as a society we can fix these problems.[/li][li]Society is broken and no one cares. [/li][/ol]

I’m also acutely aware that (probably) nothing would come of this in my case but, for so many in slightly different situations, nightmares like this and worse are a reality. I’m thinking of asset forfeiture (in your country) and outrageous deportations (in my own) in particular.

If I were a philosopher, I would take this on as my magnum opus.

@excavating_for_a_mind

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.

No doubt. Those people mess it up for the rest of us.

[DesertDog]

@Telemark

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.

Yup. When I was young and living in California a buddy refused to register to vote, saying he did not want jury duty. He was called in anyway; I chortled.

[kevlaw]

@Quartz

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.

I love the idea of using one part of the bureaucracy to mess with another part.

If I weren’t so afraid of them, I would love to mess with them the way that Joe Lycett did with the parking ticket people in this video.

[silenus]

In my county ignoring a jury summons will get you hit with a bench warrant, pronto. That means they *will *get you eventually. Next time you try to renew your driver’s license, for example. And they are very unforgiving about the “I never got the summons” excuse.

Easier to just go serve. One day/one trial.

[Procrustus]

@silenus

In my county ignoring a jury summons will get you hit with a bench warrant, pronto. That means they *will *get you eventually. Next time you try to renew your driver’s license, for example. And they are very unforgiving about the “I never got the summons” excuse.

Easier to just go serve. One day/one trial.

I think you missed the part where is says he’s ineligible to serve because he’s 1) not a US citizen and 2) lives in the UK.

[Lord_Feldon]

@silenus

In my county ignoring a jury summons will get you hit with a bench warrant, pronto. That means they *will *get you eventually. Next time you try to renew your driver’s license, for example. And they are very unforgiving about the “I never got the summons” excuse.

If that’s really how it works and not something some blustering judge or bailiff said to scare people, I’d be interested to know how they maintain their juror list with the high accuracy that these kind of consequences demand. Lots of the data sources they use lag well behind the course of people’s lives.

[engineer_comp_geek]

@Lord_Feldon

I’m sure response rates vary by area, but 5% seems really low to me.

I did some poking around on google. I couldn’t find statistics on my county, but the next county over averages about a 6 percent no-show rate. My 5 percent wasn’t high. It was a bit low, but not much.

The national rate is about 30 to 40 percent.

Baltimore (the closest major city) has a no-show rate of about 55 to 60 percent.

I suspect that the OP’s scenario plays out very differently in these different types of areas.

@silenus

Easier to just go serve. One day/one trial.

In my county, it’s a full week, and you aren’t even guaranteed a trial. Or you might get more than one.

At least you get paid. ($5 per day, IIRC)

[Czarcasm]

@engineer_comp_geek

I suspect that the OP’s scenario plays out very differently in these different types of areas.

I 'm betting that in OP’s scenario, the rate of people not showing up in any U.S. jurisdiction for jury duty approaches 100%.

[excavating_for_a_mind]

@engineer_comp_geek

I did some poking around on google. I couldn’t find statistics on my county, but the next county over averages about a 6 percent no-show rate. My 5 percent wasn’t high. It was a bit low, but not much.

The national rate is about 30 to 40 percent.

Baltimore (the closest major city) has a no-show rate of about 55 to 60 percent.

I suspect that the OP’s scenario plays out very differently in these different types of areas.
…

A while back (jeez, it must be twenty years or more, now) in Houston, Texas, a Judge was so aggravated at the lack response (a trial was subject to being delayed due to lack of jurors, IIRC) that he ordered bailiffs to go out in the downtown streets and issue summons to the first twenty people they met.

[doreen]

@kevlaw

The Jury Staff mentioned that they got my info from the DMV. They suggested that I update my address at the DMV to prevent this from happening again.

In a final ironic twist, the California DMV does not allow you to enter an address outside the USA.

Please don’t ever expect one bureaucracy to understand how another one works. DMV won’t allow you to change to an address out of the US online, but you can do it by mailing in a paper form.

But I’m still wondering how you got the jury summons. It was mailed to your last California address right? But how did it get to you in the UK? I’m thinking that might be where the problem lies

1 Jury summonses aren’t generally forwarded (even if you put in a forwarding order) so I’m pretty sure that’s not how it got to you.
2 If you didn’t submit a forwarding order, the carrier would have figured out that you don’t live there by now if the new occupants were returning your mail marked “no such person at this address” and the carrier would have returned it marked something like “not deliverable as addressed”

The only way I can see that you even found out is that you never submitted a forwarding order when you left Santa Clara, and whoever is living there now is accepting your mail and notifying you/sending it to you. Which is rather an unusual situation for the court people- you claim you are no longer a resident but still received mail they sent to you at that address. It’s not unheard of- I still get plenty of my son’s mail three years after he moved out. But if he moved out of state and got a letter from a court, even one that didn’t say “jury summons” on the outside , that’s the piece of mail that gets marked “not known at this address” and given back to the carrier.

[kevlaw]

@doreen

But I’m still wondering how you got the jury summons. It was mailed to your last California address right? But how did it get to you in the UK?

I still work for a company based in California. My mail is forwarded to my work address and my colleagues let me know when there is something important-looking.

[Acsenray]

@kevlaw

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.

I’m not sure why you think it’s some degree of injustice for you to have to send a paper letter to clear up this matter.

This is about a member of society’s obligation to serve the justice system. You actually were a resident of that county for some time, so it’s not entirely unfair that the county included you in a list of people who are obligated to respond to a summons to serve (besides the issue of whether you would actually eventually be eligible to serve on a jury).

And, sure, you have a good reason to ask to be relieved of this duty and, sure, any reasonable institution would grant you that relief, based on your circumstances. But why do you consider it so unreasonable that what they ask for in that process is a paper letter?

Justice is a serious institution. Isn’t fair for this one thing that you are required to respond with a type of communication that’s takes slightly more effort than clicking a link? How many such letters has Santa Clara County–or any other county–obligated you to send in the past year? Just this? Or are you spending tons of money sending such letters?

And, also, sending a letter isn’t that hard.