under duress

[calimac]

Every day for a week I had to check in at 5 p.m. Every day I was told to check back at 11 a.m. the next morning. Every day at 11 a.m. I was told to check back in at 5. Until today when I was told I was dismissed without further ado. In between, however, I couldn't take any out of town trips, or even be more than an hour away at mid-day, in case I received any other message than "check back in at 5." I could not, for instance, go up to the City for a noon concert, as I'd have liked to do. Or anything else.

What was my crime? Was I on probation? Was I one of those offenders who's shackled to an ankle bracelet GPS monitor?

No, none of those. I was on call for jury duty.

Required public duties seem to consist of two things: voting and jury service. Funny, isn't it, how they're offering more and more flexibility about how and when to do the one, but they still keep you on a leash for a week for the other.

We read a lot concerning obstreperous and uncooperative jurors. It might help if they were treated less like patsies during the trial and less like criminal defendants on bail or probation, at the beck and call of every vagary of the court system's schedule, before it.

Comments

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

Wow. Rather - no, A lot - more constraining than my own experiences with jury duty in Kentucky. Although if your exposure is only a week, that might almost be an imaginable trade-off. (Almost.) In Kentucky, you are on call for duty over a 2 or 3 month time-frame. But you can call in the night before, on a schedule, and know whether or not you have to show up the next day, and when you'll have to check in again. Both in Paris and in Lexington, they were also pretty good about scheduled convention trips I had.

I was also just a little grumped that I've been called twice, and Scott never has. And yes, he's a voter too.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Your week is assigned a month or two in advance. If it's a bad week for you, you can pick a replacement week of your own choice for a later date, but you have to stick to it.

This duty isn't terribly constraining, but it is irksome, because the restrictions feel so much like a punishment one hasn't earned.

[ckd]

Massachusetts has a "one day or one trial" system. Much more reasonable, IMO. If you're not empaneled, you're done for the next three years.

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

I think the first time I was in the pool, in Paris, it was termed "one day or one trial". As I kept not being home, I only got my one day in right at the end, right before a worldcon at our busiest time, and I actually got stuck on a jury. On the second round. It was a very straighforward case at least: the second time Alex was called in San Diego, he ended up on the jury of a murder trial!

In LEX, it's one trial, but I know I went twice to the big pool. After being excused off one jury, that was it. In our little Commonwealth, each of the 120 counties can haz different jury rules.

[magscanner.livejournal.com]

Did they call you in for a possible jury panel?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Always a bridesmaid never a bride. Much ado about nothing.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I don't find this terribly constraining. I rarely travel more than an hour from the courthouse. Heck, last time I was on jury duty, I worked two blocks away. Simply calling in twice a day is not a big deal. In fact, I was called in... and dismissed. See Dismissed! and previous few entries.

A small price to keep the barbarians from the gates.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The calling is was not a big deal. And in fact they put it on a web site, which makes it even easier. It's being on tenterhooks for a week and having to keep one's life on hold that is a slightly bigger deal.

And I'm not at all convinced that jury duty has anything to do with keeping the barbarians from the gates. Jurors are patsies, I claimed before. The Prop 8 trial was a far more sophisticated and subtle thing because it was being heard before an intelligent judge, and not a jury: at jury trials various things must be omitted, redacted, and simplified, for fear of how these unpredictable amateurs might take it. Which is ironic, because the original point of having jurors was to insert unpredictable amateurishness into the process.