Some positive experiences from readers to contrast with the negative ones:
I got to serve on two juries – one civil, one criminal – when I was 21 years old. Loved every second of it. I subsequently became a trial attorney and love talking in front of juries – the smarter and more interested the better. The system is far from perfect. There are problems in presentation, payment and the like, it’s long, and it’s boring. And there are legitimate reasons to avoid it – illness, disability, and child care chief among them. But the reality is that at the end of the day, most people want to avoid it because it’s inconvenient – it disrupts our schedules, it requires some extra time and some extra work. Sort of like voting; something a large number of people like to avoid as well because, well, you know, it doesn't mean anything and it's inconvenient.
They should be ashamed. Americans live a life of advantage in what has been one of the wealthiest countries in the world. People fight and die and protest for rights such as a jury trial. Yet many look their noses down at the right as if it were a used Kleenex. Give something back to your country, your community. Go. Participate.
Another writes:
Here’s the viewpoint of a juror who felt privileged to serve on a petit jury and later as a grand juror (a one-year term) in the United States Federal Court in the Eastern District of Virginia. It was the experience of a lifetime, and a loss to those who duck the responsibility.
Our grand jury panel was encouraged to ask questions by the Assistant US Attorneys, sometimes even of witnesses. Often they pursued new lines of questioning based on a suggestion by one of the jurors. Contrary to the saying that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, we refused to issue an indictment in one case because we didn’t think there was sufficient effort in following other promising leads. The jurors and the witnesses, sometimes shackled prisoners, were always treated with respect.
The judges and attorneys were generous in praise of our service. I came away from the experience impressed with the federal court system, at least in the Eastern District of Virginia. The coffee, bagels, and donuts were great, too!
Another:
I used to hate jury duty in the days when most courthouses made you show up all day (or often all week) to sit and wait and wait to be called. Now most courts make it much more convenient, with phone or online check-ins so you only physically come in when you're likely to be put on a case. I've been on juries three times and found it interesting and rewarding, and sometimes disturbing.
That was most pronounced in a Los Angeles cocaine possession case about 20 years ago. The defendant was a black man of modest means from an "undesirable" neighborhood and his lawyer wasn't very good, but the cops' story just didn't feel right. What they claimed to have seen just didn't seem plausible. The trial was brief – basically just the cops giving their version and the defendant denying it – but the discussion in the jury room was quite animated and it took most of a day to agree. In particular, I remember one woman – white and seemingly affluent and educated – who kept insisting that if a policeman said something, it by definition had to be true: "Those officers know the penalty for perjury," was the line she repeated again and again. It was a moment that crystallized for me what a struggle it can be to get actual justice, particularly if you're poor and non-white.
But this one had a happy ending: Eventually the jurors favoring acquittal prevailed. I'll never know for sure if the guy did the crime or not, but I know absolutely that it wasn't proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And it made me more sure than ever that aware and skeptical people need to be on juries, inconvenient or not.
Another:
This discussion may be nearing an end but, my two cents: I was called for Jury Duty in NYC a few weeks back and, near the end of my 2nd day waiting to be called for service, I hadn't been. Almost free! Then … my name was called. I was unhappy to say the least and made that clear to the lawyers questioning me. I was sullen, short-answered and eye-contact averse. But, hell, I was chosen anyway for a civil case.
I'm a small business owner – film/video production – and the first day of the trial coincided with a shoot which I now needed to staff with replacements – at my expense. And on that first day, which ended up costing me about $700, nothing happened. I sat with the other five jurors and two alternates until about 4pm and was released. Bugger.
A week or so later, as testimony concluded and we entered deliberations, I had a distinct feeling of wishing the trial would last another week. It was one of the best experiences of my life. There was a palpable sense of pride in the courthouse, from bailiff to judge to attorneys, that trickled down to us jurors and made us feel we were a vital part of the American judicial system.
And the deliberations, oh the deliberations! Our jury was a cross section of ages, races, sexes and, for lack of a better word, classes (the Manhattan district covers Tribeca to Harlem and includes a slice of the Bronx). We had one of the most respectful two-hour conversations I've been a part of in a long time. Everyone spoke and everyone listened. One of the older jurors, a gentleman whose English wasn't fantastic, was at first reluctant to speak. But we essentially told him he didn't have a choice and that he had to tell us what he thought. And though visibly nervous, he did. By the end, he was passing around a cell phone with a photo of he and his wife on their wedding day, some 30 years earlier.
I'm not rich, and the expense of missing work wasn't minor for me, but this subway-riding liberal would do it again in a heartbeat.
One more:
As part of a jury pool, I was taken upstairs to the court to be part of the jury selection process for a civil case. I was the third person seated in the jury which sent my "do not want to be here for jury duty" stress through the roof. I made it through the questions and watched over the next two hours as the jury members around me were excused. In starting to accept my fate, I started looking at the remaining potential jurors and hoped that the ones I found attractive would be called. (If I'm going to be stuck with a group of people, they might as well have one that is attractive to me.) In what would be the last juror selected, a very cute woman was chosen and accepted by the attorneys.
In the jury box, we sat next to each other: she was juror #4, I was juror #3.
Over the course of the next day (there were a bunch of delays that put us in the deliberation room), I got to know her a little better and decided that at the conclusion of the trial I would ask her out. Over the course of the next day-and-a-half before a mistrial, I struck up smaller conversations while figuring out what I would say and when. In the middle of the third day, a mistral was declared. As we left the courthouse and get back to our regular lives, I asked her out in the jury parking lot. We exchanged information and were sending messages back and forth on Facebook within a week. That was back at the end of July and we've just passed our six month anniversary. And we are both very, very happy.
It makes me wonder if I had tried harder or made excuses to try to get out of jury service. I would have never met her and my world would be just a bit darker without her. Whether it is timing, fate, or the hand of the divine, it worked out for the best.
The Dish 