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I’m sitting in the nation’s largest courthouse right now. I was hoping to write a Word Wrap follow-up post and give you my 3 favorite newly-coined words, but jury duty called. And there’s no wifi in the jurors’ room, so I can’t really read the blog and sift through all your what-I’m-sure-are wonderfully inventive comments.
But I can type into a blank WORD .doc and post during my lunch break on a few jury-duty related factoids I picked up from the remarkably out-of-date video they forced us to struggle through earlier this morning.
- Factoid #1: As just mentioned, the Los Angeles Superior Court, where I’m serving, is the largest court in the US
- Factoid #2: The building I’m sitting in now, the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, has 100 courtrooms in it; again, a national record.
- Factoid #3: Some of you might recall my post on Catalina Island last year. California’s smallest courthouse, with one, part-time courtroom, is located there.
- Factoid #4: The California Constitution of 1850 mandated that Spanish and English were co-equals for legal and judicial purposes. Everything in the CA court was bilingual until 1879. (Now, only the ATMs are…. Joking!)
- Factoid #5: 1.7 million of the 2.7 million new cases filed every year are traffic ticket-related.
Other than that, it’s pretty dull here. And judging by the guy drooling on himself the next row over from me, you wouldn’t want most of these people deciding your fate. Most of the time, I’m all for professional juries. How about you all? You still believe in this form of democracy? Or do you think pros, who are paid well and well informed would do a better job making the important decisions?
Comments (12)
Comment
You must be really bored if you want to pose a question like that.
It’s valid though, as the much mythologized founding fathers had a much narrower vision of the citizen jury than we do now. Of course, all you had to be then was propertied. (Oh, and male.) While that would likely mean you’re bright it was no guarentee. They really didn’t want the riffraff involved in these things, though. That’d be me by their definition.
posted by Bassman on 6-25-2007 at 1:28 pm
You must be really bored if you want to pose a question like that.
It’s valid though, as the much mythologized founding fathers had a much narrower vision of the citizen jury than we do now. Of course, all you had to be then was propertied. (Oh, and male.) While that would likely mean you’re bright it was no guarentee. They really didn’t want the riffraff involved in these things, though. That’d be me by their definition.
posted by Bassman on 6-25-2007 at 1:28 pm
It’s sad but true; it seems like most average citizens try to get out of jury duty once they’re summoned. Jury pay rarely equals what they’d earn at work. So the pool is rarely filled with “our peers.
The one time I was called for jury duty was when I’d been recently laid off from work. We jurors had to show up daily and wait to see if any cases would actually proceed to trial. In the meantime, our minds couldn’t be prejudiced, so there was no TV or radio in the jury room (lest something regarding a pending case be mentioned), nor no recent newspapers or magazines. We had to amuse ourselves with 10-year-old copies of Reader’s Digest and jigsaw puzzles. Oh, and we had to wear appropriate attire on top of it (no jeans, T-shirts, etc.).
Good times. For $15.00 per half day.
posted by Kara on 6-25-2007 at 1:38 pm
I don’t know about anyone else, but there are a lot of common folk out there that I really wouldn’t want to decide my fate. That sort of thing should be left to people who know what they’re doing.
posted by Pointy-Hatted Geek on 6-25-2007 at 1:58 pm
Wow, Kara,Years ago I was called to jury duty right after I was out of work too…think they check the unemployment rolls for candidates?
posted by Lauren on 6-25-2007 at 2:16 pm
Professional jurors would just be a target for post-trial litigation. They’d spend just as much time getting sued as they would hearing cases. Unless you’re proposing some sort of indemnification against lawsuits.
Also, the possibility for corruption would be significantly greater if all jurors were pulled from the same pool every time.
Additionally, you would have a whole profession who had to remain unaffected by the world around them on a consistent basis. What happens when it comes time to vote for President, for example?
posted by Bill T. on 6-25-2007 at 2:21 pm
Bill T., I agree wholeheartedly.
Also, who on earth would WANT the job of professional juror? The small cases are boring, and in the big cases, a person’s life is in your hands. I would not want the kind of person who enjoys that to be the one deciding my fate!
posted by Molly on 6-25-2007 at 2:46 pm
As an attorney I love the concept of professional jurors because it would eliminate one of the biggest headaches in the system: idiots in the jury box.
However, realistically it would be next to impossible to protect from abuses of such a system (random nature of jury assignment, preventing corruption/bribes, etc).
A socially more distasteful (given our PC times) but potentially fruitful middle ground is minimum educational requirements for potential jurors. It shrinks the pool a bit, but most of what is taken out of the pool should have been caught by a filter anyhow and it preserves the randmomness, etc.
posted by Ed on 6-25-2007 at 4:05 pm
I agree with Bill T. as well. As to Ed’s comment, most defense attorneys do their level best to dismiss anyone with an education, i.e., teachers. As a result, I’ve only served on one jury. We were diverse as to age, sex, race, education, etc. I was impressed by how seriously everyone took their responsibility as a juror.
posted by Barbara on 6-25-2007 at 10:15 pm
Instead of professional juries, they should have a different system of selecting jurors. A judge who has been briefed on the case should select an intelligent and impartial jury, and not let the attorneys be able to boot people off who are too smart to be conned.
posted by Ed Hamilton on 6-25-2007 at 11:24 pm
Why not go a step further and elect a jury pool (since we elect many judges)? They wouldn’t have to be full-time. Make it like the states that have “citizen legislatures” with guys who have regular jobs most of the time, but spend a few months serving in their elected roles.
You could keep the same voir dire process, eliminate forcing people to do something they’re not interested in doing, and have term limits to avoid lifetime professional jurors.
I’ve never thought about this before… am I missing any glaring problems with this idea?
posted by Jeremy on 6-26-2007 at 6:55 am
If we could find a way around the possible corruption issues in a professional jury system, I would definitely prefer that. As to who would want the job, I would. I’ve never been called for jury duty, but I have worked a one day temp job as a practice jury. We were paid and fed well. It was exceedingly interesting!
posted by Tru on 6-26-2007 at 11:54 am