Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

That room has now filled up, along with an overflow room. Based on the number of tags left on the registration desk, there appears to be 15 no-shows out of around 80 summoned.

Didn't check my good pants for mainara stains from a previous event. Other jurors are wearing jeans, which is supposed to be a no-no.

Make that 71 summoned instead of 80, again with 15 no-shows. Only 14 will be selected out of 56 remaining, but I have a lowish number, and the selection goes in numerical order.

liveblogging jury selection: sootedjustice continues to be the hero we need! #moar

You should ask the judge: How, exactly, does the fabric of the clothes a potential juror is wearing make them a better or worse juror?

Pretty sure I went in jeans, tennis shoes, and a dress/golf shirt, which would've been my working clothes at that time.

We all filed into the courtroom, met the D.A.s and the defendent, and the judge asked 8 potentially disqualifying questions of us. Those answering yes held their cards up.

I couldn't in good conscious answer yes to any of them.

Now we're back in the jury room, and being called back individually for further questioning.

Thanks bob_124!

Nobody is catching any crap for it, so it's probably more of a suggestion than a rule.

mainara creme pies are the best

Lol whoops. That was marinara, from buffet ziti IIRC

Free after I explained to the judge that I would consider voting to acquit if I felt the charges were unjust or unwarranted, though proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

So the jury nullification angle worked. The case was for a prison shivving, so not particularly edifying.

I am now free from the random selection process for 3 years.

I might have stuck around if the case was interesting or instructive; but yeah, shivvers gonna shiv.

I'm of two minds from today's events. I'm happy that I dodged a timesucking bullet that would have shunted me into the world of bad people doing bad things in bad places, but I'm also disappointed in myself that I didn't make more of an effort to faithfully discharge my civic duty. The peer jury system isn't perfect, but it's better than the other options for jurisprudence that we've come up with over the centuries.

Also, jury nullification is fine in principle, but it has also been used in the past for evil; southern juries of the 19th and 20th centuries freeing perpetrators of lynchings is an example.

I've only been called and selected to do jury duty once.
It was sort of a weird case. A guy, middle aged at the time, who was being held for child molestation. He was guilty of multiple cases that he committed from when he was a teenager. With some of his female cousins, if I remember correctly. The case was a review for release case in front of a judge and jury. He was being held in some mental institution, not prison.
His lawyer had him stand next to us as he tried to convince us that his client was rehabilitated.
So the guy is staring me in the eyes with a big smile, to try to show what a nice guy he, I guess, the whole time his lawyer was trying to win me over. It was really creepy. Bad lawyer.
We deliberated for a few hours and sent him back where he belongs.
Ahh, jury duty. An honor and privilege of every citizen.

Edit: was called for jury duty once before when I was pretty young. A murder case.
I made some excuse , something stupid like I didn't like cops, and was sent home.
Didn't want to spend possibly months in a court room. Hey, I was young. Had better things to do.

This discussion of jury duty has gotten me to thinking. Since many people don't want to serve, for various reasons, I wonder if a volunteer pool would be a good approach.

I'm retired, don't generally have anything else to do, might not mind. Let Bob, who's working and needs the income, go to work.

That narrows the pool of potential jurors, so maybe not as fair to the potential defendant? Maybe have a combo of selected + volunteers?

I think a solidly-screened volunteer pool is a great idea, with parties still having the opportunity to do jury selection/voir dire from a pool of the volunteers.

I like the volunteer idea, but I'll play devil's advocate and wonder if having regs around the courtroom would do more to encourage either corruption/tampering with the defense side, or sympathy/camaraderie with the prosecution side, given that the lawyers on both sides are also regs.

This was also my first thought...

sj, the true test of musicals appreciation is your opinion on paint your wagon
and jury duty is something i've never tried to get out of unless it was a truly undue burdon on my life at the time
be the jurror for others you hope to have if you should ever need one

SJ's point is well-taken on the jury issue. I'm thinking of a pool made of people who volunteer + some selected the old way, to hopefully get a good mix.

Another possible problem is accused gets friends/bribes people to volunteer, hoping to get one on their jury. Not sure how that could be managed, if the relationships weren't obvious.

I've been called for JD a few times but never selected. A problem with a volunteers is that anyone who volunteers might well have a bias for against prosecuting certain sorts of offence (or types of accused/racial identities , etc.) of accused). I guess that could potentially be identified in pretrial juror questioning?

I'd prefer a volunteer or mixed volunteer and conscript jury pool in ideal world. In the real world, it would likely be necessary to go beyond pre-trial questioning/voir dire and keep tabs on the regs' trial stats, like how many hung juries and mistrials could be attributed to them. I think a mixed pool could work under those circumstances, but that would call for an increase in paperwork and bureaucracy in a system that already has enough of that. I still haven't received my follow-up notice, which was supposed to come in the mail 10 days before the selection.

I've never seen Paint Your Wagon. I'd like to see Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood chew up scenery while the beautiful Jean Seberg held her own against them, but I'm not as excited about hearing any of them sing. Christopher Plummer from The Sound of Music should have told them that there's no shame in being dubbed over.

Ms. Seberg was great in Godard's Breathless, but her political activism caught the eye of Hoover's FBI, and they hounded her into a career dead end, then suicide in 1979.

I’m a former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney. An opt in pool is the worst idea imaginable. The only people that will opt in will be there to convict

Ok will tell a story of the one time I was in a jury pool. Guy was there as a previously convicted felon for having a firearm which isn’t allowed for felons and means straight back to jail. I got the feeling from the line of questioning that they didn’t actually have a firearm and that a cop claimed he had seen one and the ex felon then must of threw it in a river or something.

They asked if I was more likely to believe the word of a cop over a random person. I said I would trust a cop less as it’s their job to get arrests and convictions and they might stretch the truth while a random civilian wouldn’t have any reason to potentially make things up.

They didn’t like that answer and I was gone.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVLTxqI4i...