Jury Doody
The cold wash of unpleasant realization: In this particular case it was brought on by noting that the jury duty I had postponed three months ago had come back around again and I had let it completely slip from my mind. Until, of course, the last minute.
Jury duty is something that I have fairly strong feelings about. My opinion is that too many people who would make excellent jurors skip out on it because it is too problematic for them to contribute their civic responsibility. More on that in a second.
My particular experience with jury duty has been that the couple of times I’ve been called, I always end up in one of the later groups so I call and get told to try back tomorrow, I call the next day and get told the same thing, I call the third day and get told “Thanks, we got our jury.” So despite me thinking that I should be contributing by being on a jury, I have never been asked to. I’ve never even had to go into the courthouse. In this case though, my group number is insanely low so the odds of me not going down to the courthouse are roughly 2,975,468,211,391,261,996 to one.
When I worked at the City, jury duty was like a happy vacation. By law or, perhaps (and this is a long shot) by logic, civil employees receive their full pay from their particular agency when they serve jury duty. When I got this notice I was still working at the City. I was actually quite excited about the prospect. I would get to do something new and different while collecting my regular paycheck, plus I’d be acting like a responsible citizen. Win/win/win! Of course just before I was supposed to call in the first time I switched jobs. Nik called the courthouse for me and told them I had a brand new job I couldn’t fail to show for and they granted me a three month extention.
Now I’m conflicted. My current job does no such kind of salary matching for time spent on jury duty. I suppose I could use a few vacation days during the process to make sure I get some money, but if the trial were to last longer than, for example, Wednesday, I’d be pretty much limited to whatever the pay for jurors is ($5 per day or something?). This is a legitimate problem since with Nikki being out of work due to her back injury, we’re mostly doing the one-income thing. And that means that me spending several days or weeks getting 16% of my salary is going to cause a problem.
But that puts me into the position that I’m sure most regular folks find themselves in when it comes to jury duty: In an abstract sense I want to be a part of the justice system. I think it is important to do that so that our juries aren’t populated exclusively by housewives and retired teachers and welfare recipients. I think too often complex judicial issues are handled in a less than ideal way by prosecutors because the common consensus is that juries will get lost and call their own confusion reasonable doubt. I’m not trying to suggest I’m better or more capable than any of the people I listed, but diversity is an important part of an effective jury. When all that lawyers can count on from any potential jury is that 85% of them will cite Oprah as their primary source of world news, trouble abounds.
Yet it is precisely the people like me who just might offer a bit more roundness to a jury but I’m in the same boat as all the other educated and critially thinking (stop that laughing) individiuals: It may be a responsibility but it isn’t one they make particularly easy to uphold. I think I’d be a good juror. I want to serve as a juror. Doing so would be a major headache for me. So what are my options?
I can lock it up and do the whole sacrifice thing, or I can go in there on Monday and tell them the truth: The system is broken because it offers me no choice but to claim exemption due to personal difficulty.
Here’s how I think it should work: First I think the courts should pay a semi-decent wage. I just checked and our local court pays $15/day and $0.34 per mile traveled. That’s like $1.86 per hour. Hello? Minimum wage in the US is $5.15/hour and in California it is $6.75/hour. That means that at the very least we should be giving jurors $41.20 per day and in California they should be getting at least $54.00 per day. I think what should happen is that jurors should get their state’s minimum wage and there should be a mandate that requires companies to pay their employees’ full salary (minus the amount granted by the court) for a reasonable period of time. I don’t know how long the average court case lasts, but I’m guessing two to three weeks minimum should cover most trials. Of course this should only apply to those chosen jury members and alternates. I don’t mind losing a day’s pay to fulfil my civic duty during the jury selection process, I just don’t want to have to sit there and pray I’m not chosen the whole time.
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