Saw a guy get out of jury duty by quoting sovereign citizen nonsense, once. Try telling the judge you don’t recognize the authority of his court. Pretty sure he can’t arrest you for that if you’re just there for jury duty.
You’re saying you can ignore a court summons with no consequences. Because that’s what a jury summons is.
You’re setting yourself up for a contempt of court citation. Judges are not happy when you ignore court orders.
Here’s an explanation. Some important points:
- Jury duty is not voluntary
- ignoring a jury summons can be treated as contempt of court.
I’m saying that practically speaking, it virtually never happens. You weren’t served by a process server and they can’t prove that you got it. And they nearly always get enough people to fill the pool from the people who voluntary show up. And they don’t want to waste time with people who purposely ignore the summons. And they don’t have the resources to send cops out to go after people who ignore the summons who, again, they don’t need and may have left town and would be a pain in the ass once they got there.
I once got one right after I left for a six week business trip. By the time I got home I had missed the date. I called the number and started to explain the situation and before I gave them my name the person laughed and told me not to worry about it.
Yeah, that court clerk wasn’t lying if she was talking about what could happen or what might happen. She would have been lying if she said it “will” happen - but she apparently did not say that.
NYPD usually has somewhere in the neighborhood of a million open warrants , so even if a judge issues a warrant for skipping jury duty, the cops aren’t actively looking for you. But that doesn’t mean you wont get arrested on that warrant if it pops up on a traffic stop. I suspect the same is true in most jurisdictions with fairly large populations. Might be different if you live in a village of 3000 with its own police department.
I missed jury duty once in Seattle because in these days of autopay bills my home filing system is a mess. I asked a well respected lawyer friend what to do and he said I should do nothing. They have no proof I ever saw the notice, and even if they thought I did (like if I scheduled a deferral or something) they have no interest or time to waste on no shows.
Same thing happened in a different city later when I left on a last minute emergency business trip in a frantic attempt to fix a problem client relationship. In my rush, I didn’t look at the next week on the calendar.
Before anyone decides I’m a total scofflaw, I’ve served on a jury before and been dismissed several times. Back in December I was called and the judge got up in front of the room and said that he was empaneling jurors for a trial expected to run nine months. Pretty much everyone not retired or working a government job got excused immediately.
You didn’t read the article, did you? It’s talking specifically about NYC.
Note that summonses are sent out with a request for address correction. If it’s not deliverable, the commissioner of Jurors notes it and doesn’t expect you to show up.
As the article says (read it. It’s short), they may let it slide the first time, but if it happens again, they won’t. And they have no trouble finding you, since they know your address (if you moved, they get a notice from the PO).
Ok. I just read the “article” and it’s actually a blog post on some lawyer’s web page with a lot of qualifications. I stand by my previous post.
That’s not what it says. It says that it can be treated as contempt as court and contempt of court may be punished with fines and jail time.
There’s a legal difference between the words “may” and “shall”. The fact that they use “may” means someone gets to decide one way or the other. If it said ‘shall’, then these charges would happen automatically.
Still seems like an unnecessary risk.
I finally–after 35 years of being a registered voter in Virginia–got one a few months ago. Sounded interesting, too, a murder case with multiple defendants. And I work remotely for a California company, who are used to folks getting called for jury duty (seems to happen a LOT in California), so I wasn’t worried about that.
Alas, my wife’s health is such that it really wasn’t going to work for me to be gone all day for an unknown period. I filled out the questionnaire they sent indicating this, and was told “You don’t need to serve”.
As others have noted, YMMV depending on jurisdiction, but this felt like a perfectly sane response to me. And I’m still irritated that they didn’t ask me a decade ago, when I could have happily served!
I was called for jury duty about 15 years ago. I went and everyone was asked if we had a reason to be excused. My excuse was my hearing. I cannot hear well enough for jury duty. Sometimes I’ll mishear words.
The judge excused me saying that the standard was I would need to be able to understand english, if I can’t hear it properly, I obviously don’t understand it.
He told the clerk to permanently excuse me.
Maybe this is why my experience is so different to @hajario. I’ve exclusively had interactions with the jury system in CA, specifically LA County. They’re hard-nosed here. They’re also a lot tighter than they used to be with the exemptions.
I’m in Santa Barbara County. They can be hard nosed to people who show up and try to use a ridiculous excuse. They don’t act all if you ignore the summons. I have known many people who have and I have never heard of an instance where an authority showed up at someone’s home to arrest them which was the overly silly claim made that started this hijack. Counties just don’t have the resources to do that particularly if they get enough potential jurors to fill up the trials that they have.
Neither have I. But I know of people who have had contempt citations issued against them. SB is more La La Land than L.A. If you have money there, nobody’s gonna bug you.
I read this thread this morning and thought, huh, I bet it’s been 20 years since I’ve been summoned to jury duty.
Guess what came in the mail today. No kidding.
I’m not complaining, it beats the hell out of a day at work.
mmm
Same here. The first time I got a summons, as I mentioned it to other people I was surprised at how many people said something to the extent of ‘yeah, I got one a few years ago, I just threw it out’. To my knowledge, nothing ever became of it in any of those cases. If there was a genuine shortage of potential jurors, to the point that cases couldn’t were getting delayed, I could see them enforcing it, but as of right now, I’ve never heard of anything happening.
As noted above, there’s no proof you actually got the letter. Or that if you did, you didn’t throw it out with your junk mail because, without malicious intent, assumed it was junk mail. I could see the courts doling out small ($20 or $30) fines as a money maker, but then they’d have to send out the letters via certified mail.
I got a summons a few months ago. When I filled out the online survey, one of the questions was ‘do you have a runny nose’, I [truthfully] checked yes, and that kicked me out of the survey and I was told I don’t need to report for duty.
I remembered this from a while back. In 2012 35% percent of the jurors summoned in Queens County NY failed to show up.
Apparently, there are really no consequences. It takes work to enforce the summons, to figure out who really still lives in the county and is eligible to serve.
And the no-show rate makes what was a really horrible experience even worse because you feel like a chump for not just tossing the summons.
The last time I served in Queens, in 2015, it was a horrible experience. I stood in line for two hours to get processed through security and scolded for being late……even though they apparently bring everyone in a day before they intend to call them just to process them in. And the staff was rude, sarcastic and generally nasty when it came to answering questions from the jury pool. I wanted to shake this one guy and say “You know, you are talking to a different group of people every day, stop it with this “You people ask the same damn questions every single day and I’m sick of answering them” attitude. The room was huge and echoed and I could barely hear the names being called, and they were marking people as no shows when they were sitting in the room.
I was really kicking myself for not just throwing the summons in the trash.
I had served previously in 2008, in the same courthouse and it was not unpleasant. Everyone was polite and nice, if you wanted to leave to grab a smoke or buy a snack, you could just check out with the staff and you wouldn’t get in trouble if you missed you name….and if you weren’t put on a jury on the first day you were called in to the courthouse ( it was a call in the day before system) you didn’t have to come back.
Also, in 2008, the jury room was nice, with a well-stocked vending area, banks of computer terminals, a movie area and a reading area with a decently stocked bookshelf. When I went back in 2015, all the vending was out of service, the bookshelves and computers were gone ( although it’s understandable that you might not need the computer terminals in 2015, what with everyone having mobile devices) and they were no longer showing movies.
It sucked.
Same thing happened to my grandmother. She told the judge she was deaf in one ear and couldn’t hear very well out of the other and she got permanently excused.
My dad got a jury duty summons after he died. My mom called the courthouse to explain why Dad wouldn’t be reporting for jury duty and the woman she got on the phone was incredibly rude and cut her off before she could even finish her sentence. “There’s no reason for him to not be there! If he doesn’t show up he’ll be in contempt of court!” Mom said “If you’d let me finish I’m trying to tell you he died six months ago and you might want to update your records.” Mom said you could hear the rude lady’s jaw drop… Dad never got another summons. 
I can tell you that, in our town, under the authority of the now-retired municipal judge, being nine months pregnant was not an excuse. My wife appeared as ordered, missing her scheduled doctor’s appointment. The child died (in utero) two days later.
True story.