Are there any civil “duties” that carry as much vitriol as jury duty? Imagine missing home for a week – out of state work assignment, small vacation, or maybe a life changing event happened. You finally get back home, you’re excited to get back to your routine, and then the best government surprise in the mail. There is a lot of animosity towards jury duty, and there really shouldn’t be. What follows here is how to have a ball at jury duty.
Make sure to bring some extra cash. When you arrive to begin your civil service, you may be surprised to see how many people show up. But the court system might summon 150 people or so for 3-4 court cases. If each jury has two alternates, then 56 people will be selected to cover four cases. So the odds of being selected are relatively small, even after some people are let out of the jury pool for whatever reason. As the day goes on, some cases may be settled before the case gets to trial. Even on the day the trial should start, settlements can be made or pleas accepted. So out of the four cases, you might have 2 that actually go to trial. Odds are even smaller now. Point being, a creative mind can foster a decent gambling ring to make the day go by.
Get paid. You have a government excuse to miss work (which is a very strong excuse) and they pay you. If you are a salaried worker, then there are no financial incentives to get out of jury duty. Take some of your tax dollars back!
What’s more fun than people watching? You will have plenty to look at. And since jury duty is selected from the general public, you get the chance to watch and/or interact with folks you might otherwise never get to meet (or cross the street if you see them on the sidewalk). And the ones you don’t meet, you can just sit back and watch and discuss with the clique that you form.
The biggest gain that comes from jury duty is being selected for a jury and going through the selection and trial. You get to be a part of the hidden process that doesn’t make headlines. Voir dire is the next selection step. You get a preview of the trial from the prosecution and the defense. The lawyers are questioning, poking, manipulating, and confusing the jury. Some people don’t get addressed at all, and some draw so many questions they may feel like they’re on trial instead of the defendant (who, by the way, is in the room). You get an idea of the crime, and how the state is interpreting it, and how the defense is going to present their arguments.
If you’re lucky, you get to see this twice! In this author’s case, our first jury was considered “tainted” because of something the lawyers let slip in the voire dire or maybe because of answers or connections in the jury pool. Either way, if you get to do it twice, you get to see 4 different ways of looking at the process. Two crimes, two days spent answering questions.
The trial itself can be a bit of a let down, because you are actually watching or hearing about the crime. And there is a difference between a quiet defendant in the courtroom versus what they look like and how they act on body camera footage. You are balancing knee jerk reactions to the crime with the process of law, because there are some grey areas that aren’t often discussed but very important. But when that’s finished and a verdict is reached, you can be prideful of upholding justice in the courtroom. Apathy or hostility is not necessarily good in this case. There needs to be direction, deliberation, actual open discussion, and open minds in the jury room.
Jury duty sounds like the most boring time in the world, and for the ill-prepared I would imagine it is. But life is what you make it, and jury duty falls in that category. You can get paid to meet people, take some time off of work, perform a civil service, and gain priceless knowledge about the back end. And here’s a helpful hint: if you try to get out of it for hardships, scheduling, etc. the court just recycles you a month or two in the future. I went through 1.5 trials and was gone by Wednesday. The folks from our group were recycled into a pool of jurors for a month long trial. Play the numbers game!
Bayou Observant 