Jury Duty

ucsd_ucla_dad
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:07:07 +0000

abraxas:

A few things -


If you stated different addresses or even stated your name differently (Becky instead of Rebecca or something) then you could get called twice by the same court or by different courts. The jury worker told us once (when I was called for jury duty) to make sure you contact the court to get this straightened out so you don’t get called too often. I suggest calling the court in LA and telling them you’re actually a resident of another location and would like to fix this up so you don’t get called by two different courts. They may or may not sympathize and help with this.
As you’ve found out, they don’t exempt full time students in California.
Depending on the type of court, they usually let you postpone up to 6 months without the need of any excuse. You can postpone until summer. My D ended up doing it during spring break. The jury rooms are filled with students during spring break. Luckily she wasn’t called to a trial and was out of there and done that morning.
Depending on the court, you can sometimes get out of it if you don’t have adequate transportation. However, they include buses and subways as ‘transportation’. If you can demonstrate that it’d take you an hour or 2 to get there, they might let you off.
Depending on the court, after you show up in the jury pool, they usually ask people to state if they have only a short amount of time available for duty. It used to be that the minimum was 5 days and students usually identified themselves in this category - especially during spring break. They have plenty of trials that’ll typically last 3 or 4 days. The downside is that these jurors are the first ones actually called into the courtroom for those shorter trials. My D however, said they upped the minimum number of days to 7. People in business usually have a max of around 10 days that their employers will pay (depending on the place) so they usually get on a trial for no longer than that period of time. Any government worker, including teachers and professors, postal employees, etc. have to serve on any length trial since the government will pay them even if the trial lasts for months.


I recommend at least trying to pursue the first option I mentioned since it’s not really fair that you’re on the list of two court jurisdictions to be called.