I used to think it would be really interesting to be on a jury. Then my husband was summoned for jury duty. It was a murder trial with multiple victims and killers. During jury questioning, the defendant’s attorney kept referring to my husband as Mr. “Last Name” of “City Name”. We have an unusual last name and someone could easily track us down with that info. My husband told the judge he was so concerned with the accused knowing that information about him, he wasn’t sure he could be impartial and was excused. Now I have a summons waiting in the mail. I hope I get a boring case.
Yes, my case was pretty “boring.”. An older man was accused of assaulting a burly teen and scaring him so much he ran away and didn’t go home for a prolonged period of time. The accused said he just scolded the teen from picking and throwing fruit from his tree.
At the time of the trial, the accused was about 90# and 5’. The teen was 5’10” or so and maybe 175-200#. The parents never got the teen any medical care.
We voted 11-1 to acquit. Took a lunch break and after lunch we were unanimous.
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This sounds like a frivolous lawsuit. Waste of everyone’s time and money.
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It was a criminal assault case, but I agree there was very little evidence the old man did anything but scold the teen. Somehow the state was pressured to bring the case.
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The one holdout juror said, “I think something happened.” We politely said that wasn’t the issue we are being asked to decide—we need to all agree that the state has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that accused has committed the offense he was charged with. After lunch, the juror agreed with us — no proof.
I was glad we could let the poor accused guy to home and no longer have this hanging over his head like a dark cloud. It’s awful to be accused, even when you and those who care about you know you did nothing wrong. It’s quite an ordeal to have to undergo a criminal trial. I was glad to have served and help make sure the correct result occurred as soon as we could all agree.
Jury duty exemption rules vary by state. However, I expect if you don’t want to serve, there are ways to do so. With more information about state and personal details, I could give a more specific answer.
I wouldn’t mind participating in a jury in theory, including listening to and being involved in court decisions, but in practice it doesn’t well for me and would far less pleasant than my usual routine. So I have always chosen to not participate. There are countless valid ways to avoid serving. For example, I mentioned having hearing loss that may interfere with hearing things in court (a true statement) – no note from doctor or going in to courthouse, just mentioning a possible reason. In my local area, people consistently confirm that nothing happens, if jury summons are ignored. I’m not recommending this and may not be applicable to your area, but my point is likely penalties for something going wrong with exemptions may be less severe than many imagine.
Yes, it is important for jurors to be able to see and hear the evidence and understand English, since the trials I am familiar with in the US are all in English. I have seen people excused for various different reasons. When my relative was judge in charge of juries, he would call ALL the jurors summoned in and tell them that he refused to excuse his wife from jury duty (true), so he expected them all to serve if they were capable. It helped reduce the number of people interested in making frivolous excuses.
I would encourage others to serve, mainly because I feel that I have gone above and beyond with my service and should be excused from any further service.
My last summons was a little over a year ago, so I expect to see another one soon. That was my 19th summons. I have lived in three different locations and received summons in all three. The system is not random and I have a way of knowing that all but two of my summons were through my voter registration - I have seriously considered giving up voting.
It is interesting to see in this thread that in some places, serving gets you out of jury duty for an extended period of time in the future. Where I live, it is for one calendar year, and that means if you had to go in for jury duty (not just receiving a summons). Unless you have a valid excuse, you can defer once but you don’t get out of jury duty.
I cannot wait until I am 75, when I can claim an age exemption. I can self claim a medical excuse at 70 (someone mentioned this up thread, must live in the same state). Perhaps I will self claim for my mental health. And why don’t they take people out of the pool of jurors at a certain age - did they really think my 93 year old father would make a good juror? (I helped him fill out the permanent exemption.)
Not much gets you excused where I live. I thought that when the date conflicted with a commitment for work, in which I was scheduled to appear and potentially testify at a semi-judicial process before a state agency, that might get me out of jury duty. Nope, just deferred.
I have lots of other thoughts about jury duty, including that I believe we should have professional jurors, though that should be a different thread. Jurors, as much as we would like them to follow the law, and as much as they think they are following the law, run on emotion. Not only can we all think of some very public cases that ran on emotion, but I have seen some cases through my work (I am not an attorney, I’m an engineer) where the decision and/or damages award made zero sense (as in the plaintiff “won”, but damages awarded were far below the expectations of either the plaintiff or defendant).
During my service, I was offered a device to magnify the voices in the courtroom.
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Our medical center offers a device that magnifies voices presenting in their conference center auditorium. Our civic center does as well. You just leave your driver’s license so you and they can remember who got the device.
You can always call in sick!
Our household gets called yearly. Both of us have served on several juries. So far this yer both my daughter and her husband have been called. They both had to report mid week but luckily didn’t end up on the jury.
We have the system where you call the night before to see if you have to report. They have improved to the point where you now get a text message. You can find out Friday after 5 if you need to report on Monday. One deferral is allowed. They give you dates to choose from usually within three months. It seems they also are better at knowing when trials are scheduled to begin that most likely you will be called unless they pick the jury before your group comes up. If it’s a big case they call more prospective jurors.
This spring I deferred and realized after that my new date was the week I had my annual physical scheduled. The doctor didn’t have anything available for over a year. I reached out to her and was shocked when she wrote me a medical note for deferral for one year.
We have friends who ignore the summons. One friend was a personal injury attorney.
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In our household, we always respond to the jury questionnaires & summonses. It is the law. As my relatives and I are attorneys we have great respect for following the law.
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When I worked in the courtroom, those most willing to serve were small business owners. One said something I’ve always remembered. “If I needed a jury, I’d want a jury of my peers so that would be a small business owner, someone who has lived in Boulder and has an interest in the community. Like me” So we had a lot of store owners, engineers from IBM or Ball, office workers. Usually employers will pay your salary while you are there and now it is required by law in Colorado for a certain number of days but for the self employed or unemployed or paid hourly workers without a set schedule, they are getting the statutory amount and parking, and the statutory amount isn’t much (for a long time it was $6/day but I think it is slightly more now). A lawyer I worked with was chosen for a murder trial that lasted 2-3 weeks. The firm paid him his regular salary.
We only had two students on juries while I was there. One was an 18 year old who lived in Boulder with his parents so got the summons just like everyone else (it must have been the summer?) and one grad student who had lived in Boulder for a few years. I never saw someone living in a dorm or apartment get called.
Names for juries are gathered from DMV records and voter registration. Really, if you don’t want to serve you can always be excused by the judge on the case. Judges don’t want to deal with people who don’t want to be there.
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When I lived in Massachusetts, I was called twice. I was kicked off first time cuz it involved a psychiatrist and a suicide; they didn’t want a psychologist ,
The second time, the judge asked if anyone knew about the Christmas evening murder. It seemed to me that most everyone did. I felt badly because the only ones that would be on the jury would be people that never turned on the news, or were lying.
For many trials now (I’m a huge true crime junkie) for news heavy trials, they interview the jurors one by one to avoid tainting the others who haven’t heard about it. Just because you have heard about it doesn’t exclude you, but the questioning will be more about if you can follow instructions, keep an open mind, and the hard part for me, not read a newspaper or watch TV for the duration of the trial, and stay off social media!
A recent trial I watched, the one where the woman was accused of poisoning her husband but writing a children’s book about his death, most of the jurors said they’d never heard of the trial or had heard very little. It was rather a small rural county and the jurors said they just aren’t that interest in local press, don’t watch a lot of tv, don’t go into ‘town’.
My sister was called years and years ago for a death penalty case (when we still had those in Colorado). They called 500 potential jurors! Probably half were dismissed because they said they wouldn’t impose the death penalty. She made it pretty far into the process before being dismissed. The trial was going to take about 3 weeks and the jury was going to be sequestered, and it was in Dec, just before Christmas so that eliminated a lot. Of course we had all heard about the murder. It was big news (and horrible). I later worked with an attorney who told me the accused was one of the nastiest people he’d ever met (he had worked in the public defender’s office) but a kitten compared to his evil, mean, horrible mother! Found guilty, died in prison after about 30 years.
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Has that changed since your kids were young?
As far as I know, there is not a change. Having a young child doesn’t excuse you from jury duty. I had a 3 month old…and an almost 4 year old. Didn’t matter.
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That’s how it was when we lived in OH because I was called when my D was 2 and couldn’t be excused.
In IL the law is different and you can be excused for being primary caregiver for both kids and elderly parents.
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