Re: [OT] Judge reams out people avoiding jury duty

On 2025-05-20 9:40 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On May 20, 2025 at 5:45:58 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:
 

A judge in Hamilton, Ontario gathered a whole lot of people who had
failed to turn up for jury duty and demanded to know why.
>
>
https://www.thespec.com/news/crime/hamilton-courtroom-fail-to-obey-jury-duty-summons/article_6719b3d0-6d16-58bc-801e-62bf15b3fed1.html
>
I've only been called once and I showed up. The defendant made a last
minute decision to plead guilty and the whole jury pool of 250 was
dismissed so I wasn't there very long.
>
I'm under the impression that most Americans feel that only fools fail
to wiggle out of jury duty. Is this true?

 I'd actually enjoy serving on a jury, especially now that I'm retired and have
time to kill. Even when I was working, the FedGov's policy is to pay you the
whole time you're on jury duty as if you were at work, so you don't lose any
money and you get (potentially) a week out of the office. A lot of people
aren't so lucky and don't get paid while on a jury. Most, if not all, states
have laws that prohibit an employer from firing you for jury duty but they
don't have to pay you while you're on one.

Interesting. I think employers in this country have to pay you for the time you are on the jury but it may not be your normal pay. It may just be minimum wage, which would be a major cut for people with good jobs. When I told my employer about my summons, they assured me it wouldn't be a problem for them but it was inconvenient for me because I was working an evening shift that ended around midnight so I didn't get my full night's sleep before showing up for the jury pool.

 When I retired, I embarked on something I’d wanted to do for years and packed
up the car and just started lazily driving around the country, state-by-state,
staying in various places, sometimes a week at a time, to see all the sights.
L.A. to Key West, Florida to Maine, etc. The trip took me a month and a half.
 

That's all? I can imagine a trip like that lasting years.

When I finally returned home, I found a long-expired summons for jury duty in
my accumulated mail. I called the number on the summons and explained what had
happened. The woman looked up the number on my summons and said it was no
problem, they'd just cancel it in the system and issue a new summons for me
since I was home now and being retired had no work conflicts with serving. And
a few days later, a new summons showed up.

Clearly, there are *some* reasons that are considered acceptable for not answering the summons and you hit on one of them ;-)

I went and got eliminated the
moment both sides discovered I was a lawyer.
 

Is being a lawyer a get-out-of-jury-duty card in every trial? If so, maybe the process of sending out jury summonses should take that into account so that lawyers never get asked to serve on juries. Do they at least make sure you don't have a criminal record when they compile their lists of prospective jurors? Or are people with criminal records eligible to serve on juries? What about language? If you don't have fluency in the language the court is using, are you automatically disqualified from serving or do they find an interpreter for you? (The way Trump is proceeding, you may not have nearly as many language issues on juries in a few years....).
--
Rhino