Re: Jury duty considered harmful, or at least rare

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

An Anonymous College Student wants to be able to stay off jury duty,
and also complains that the system ties you up all day in court
even if you're not picked.  I've been called for jury duty in
three or four different counties, which had different approaches
to the jury selection and different levels of disrespect for the
time of potential jury pool members.  In Santa Clara County CA,
you're required to telephone into a badly organized recording
every day for a week to see if your number is up, and if
it does come up you need to go in, but otherwise not.
In Monmouth County NJ, you're called for a week, though they'll
let you go on Thursday afternoon if you haven't been picked
for a trial.  I played a lot of bridge that week....
In Middlesex County NJ, you and the lawyers all have to 
show up on Monday, and if they don't need you, you're done.

If you really want to both serve the public and get out of jury duty,
take a bunch of literature from the Fully Informed Jury Association
and start handing it out in the jury pool, explaining to people that
under the common law, juries have both the power and the moral obligation
to find people innocent if the law they're accused of is a bad law
or if the punishments are far out of proportion to the crime -
such as the fugitive slave laws of the 1800s or the 
alcohol and drug prohibitions of the 1900s, or hanging forgers in the 1800s 
or three strikes* for non-violent felons in the 1900s.  

	[*I'm not saying that three strikes for violent felons isn't appropriate, 
	but California's law goes far beyond that in practice.
	And we've had FIJA fights here before, and don't need them again.
	For the purpose of this discussion, the important FIJA issue
	is which door you'll be thrown out of, which body parts you'll land on,
	and how many times you'll bounce on your way out. :-)  ]

>Actually, the last time that I was called, the largest proportion of potential
>jurors were people who work for the government in one form or another.
>City park workers, school teachers, post office workers, clerical workers
>who work at city hall, etc.  Retirees were the next largest group.
>Between the two, they accounted for 80+ of the jury pool.

Yup.  Jury participation is critical for preserving a free society,
but you can't preserve freedom by forcing people to participate in things.
Unfortunately, to the extent that jury systems do allow people
who have better things to do with their time (like running businesses)
out of jury time, they tend to filter in favor of people who'll 
cooperate with what the government wants - like retired schoolteachers.

Also, jury selection processes tend to filter out people who
don't appear likely to do what the prosecution and/or defense tell them;
it's an interesting thing to watch.  And the prosecution and sometimes
the other jurors often get grouchy when some jurors aren't cooperative -
an engineering supervisor I once worked with was one of two jurors who
hung their jury be refusing to accept the contention that a Hispanic man
should be guilty of carrying drugs and drug paraphrenalia because the
airplane glue he'd bought at the hardware store was in a plastic bag
which he *obviously* intended to use for sniffing it with.  (And this was
in New Jersey, where's it's not even illegal to be Hispanic....)
Of course, they did get much less abuse than the friend of mine who
refused to convict someone for drug possession because the drug war is bogus...
he got yelled at a lot afterwards, but being a New Yorker he viewed that
as entertainment and returned fire in kind.




				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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