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Jury Duty
09-14-2015, 02:15 AM
Welp, I just checked the Somerset County court's webpage, and as it so happens, I have to report to jury duty tomorrow. (I've known for weeks that I've been summoned, but you never know until the night before if they really need you to come in.) If I can wrest it from Peggy's grasp, I'll take my tablet w/keyboard with me and try to keep writing DW8 Chapter 5, otherwise I expect I'll catch up on a lot of my reading.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Have fun (if you can), and here's hoping you don't get picked. I understand jury duty can be a horrid time sink.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Feh. I served on several juries during the 1990s, once as the foreman. I don't recall it being that big a deal.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I had jury duty once. Sat through morning session, went to lunch, and the plaintiff and defendant had settled while we were out.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
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I tend to be on the first group out whenever I get summoned, for some reason they don't like people with CJ degrees on juries...
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead
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My last experience with jury duty: I was planning to do work, but very quickly found out that I couldn't git pull from my company's network because they blocked port 22. Not one to be deterred, I tried setting up a bridge over port 443 through my home machine (since 80 was behind squid). You can read that as "I bypassed security".
About the time I got done with this, I was called up into a courtroom. I actually didn't mind this, as I had some work I would have been happy to offload on my coworkers. I was on the first group impaneled. I thought I was kind of sailing under the radar, because I had had something like 5 minutes of questions in the whole 2 days. And I after sitting there for all of the questioning, I was dismissed at like 9:30 AM. Thanks a lot for not dismissing the day before. I guess that defense council had just assumed that because of my career and the fact that I didn't dress sloppily in the court that I was some kind of Young Republican. And I'm kind of a bleeding-heart liberal who thinks anyone can change (and who bypasses jury room security for fun).
And that's when it hit me -- our whole legal system in based on prejudice, at least as far as jury selection is concerned. Once the automatic removals are done, lawyers attempt to profile you based on stereotypes, or choose the people who are easiest to manipulate. Jury duty: do not recommend.
Also moar DW8 pls 
-- ∇×V
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Well, I wrested the tablet (and its optional keyboard) from Peggy, so here I am on the Group W bench in the Jury Assembly Room, which happens to be a repurposed church with beautiful woodwork and stained glass, with a whole wall of organ pipes still in place. And what looks to be a historical display about a "trial of the century" about 20 feet from me which I have just noticed, and which I'll have to check out later in the day.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Update: I got called as a candidate for a criminal trial. We've just started jury selection now, with a long questionnaire, and it looks like it's going to be several hours before they get to drawing the first 12 potential jurors. If I end up on the jury, I'll be at this for two weeks or more.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I seem to get summoned once every three years on average. I've served on one civil case and one criminal case, and had one civil case settle during jury selection. The last couple of times, I got sick. That's one way to escape I suppose.
I like to joke that security for jury selection makes the TSA look sloppy, but they seem to have given up on policing cell phones.
This is in contrast to my previous address where I had jury duty twice, and got dismissed early without being impaneled. I also don't recall that location having any security to speak of. It's the difference between a small suburban county and a big city.
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Three years is apparently the standard interval. According to the woman giving our juror orientation this morning, at least in New Jersey they have four different sources that they use to generate their list of potential jurors: real estate records, tax records, voter registration and one more that I'm blanking on. And she said that if you use different forms of your name on the different sources (full middle name vs. initial, with Jr/Sr/II/III/etc vs without, and so on), their automated list system isn't smart enough to realize the variations all mean the same person, so your chance of getting a jury summons goes up because you end up with multiple entries on the list from which the random draw is made. I suspect it's much the same in other jurisdictions.
As for frequent summonses, when I lived in New Brunswick NJ during the 1990s, I got called like clockwork every three years. I ended up on three different juries -- 1 criminal and 2 civil -- and was the foreman on one of the civil suits.
Right now, though, I'm just the guy in the middle of the front row, judge's right side, in the gallery.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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How long are they going to keep you there if they don't pick you?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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I almost found myself on a jury last year. A big multiple home invasion, burglary, carjacking, & murder case. How big? The actually had two separate jury pools because they couldn't fit all the potentials in even the largest courtroom. Went on day one, didn't get dropped and came back on day two where they combined day one's morning and afternoon survivors. The reading of the witness list took around 45 minutes and they warned us to expect one month to six weeks for the trial. IIRC they picked fifty jurors altogether (12 + 38 alternates). I just barely missed being part of the alternate pool.
Read later that at the end of the first week it finally dawned on the guy that A: his partner had turned on him (with no promise of a reduced sentence), B: the witness list included something on the order of fifty eye witnesses, C: they had multiple items of DNA evidence that had gone through multiple labs, and D: he was up against combined County & State legal teams. At that point he asked if he could still make a deal and plead guilty.
But jury selection lasted almost as long as the one jury i was actually ever on, a DUI/DWI case back in the 90s, which made it to three days.
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I've been called twice, the last some nine years ago, so I'm flying under the system's radar somehow (knock wood). I was never selected. I know it was nine years, because I kept a copy of an e-mail in which I jokingly told my sister: Quote:I was called in for jury duty toward the end of July, but they released me when I threatened to have "my sister, the professor" flunk the judge's children. Fortunately, nobody thought to ask whether his children are students of yours. They did put your name on a "terrorism suspect" watch list.
Yes, I know that's not funny to normal people, but I liked it.
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Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
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Rob - it could be up to and through Thursday. But I get to check the night before each day's service to see if they need me any more.
Oh, and the "case of the century" they have here is the Hall-Mills murder trial. I'm on my phone and can't easily add the link, Wikipedia has an article on it (of course). It's a little creepy to be sitting here about six feet from the bullets, bloodstained hat and collar and other bits of evidence, though.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I've only been called for jury duty once, and when we showed up we were informed that the defendant had fired his lawyer and gotten a new one, require the trial be reschedualed so we all got to go hom.
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The initial set of 16 (yes, 16) jurors have been selected. When they bring us in after lunch it'll be time for challenges. I'm not out of the woods yet.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Okay, I just got excused from the jury (after about 20 minutes in the foreman's seat). I'm back in the pool, with a civil case coming up that might pull me in the draw of candidates.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I think I like how the local system handles the time requirement. It's one day or one trial, i.e. if you don't actually get picked for a jury on the day you come in, you don't have to come back the next day. Well, I suppose if jury selection for a trial somehow managed to take more than one day, you might have to come back for that panel, but that hasn't happened to me yet.
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...And I'm done with all service. I wasn't called for the civil case, so they said thanks, go home, that's all. Back to work tomorrow.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Quote:Inquisitive Raven wrote:
I think I like how the local system handles the time requirement. It's one day or one trial, i.e. if you don't actually get picked for a jury on the day you come in, you don't have to come back the next day. Well, I suppose if jury selection for a trial somehow managed to take more than one day, you might have to come back for that panel, but that hasn't happened to me yet.
That's basically how it worked for me when I was called two months ago. Went in the first day, sat around for about an hour, went to the court room where the judge asked us a bunch of questions, and was dismissed. Total time wasted: about 3 hours.
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