Jury Service

robduckyworth said:

Now i just await my reimbursement...

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Not only does crime not pay but justice pays. Ok, that was a bad joke. I'll show myself out.

vansmith said:

Not only does crime not pay but justice pays.

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Actually, you've got it backwards.

My jury duty netted me $16 US per day. Parking was $10, leaving $6 for lunch, if you don't take into account that I owe income tax on the $16.

toMACsh said:

Actually, you've got it backwards.

My jury duty netted me $16 US per day. Parking was $10, leaving $6 for lunch, if you don't take into account that I owe income tax on the $16.

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That's better than nothing (which is what I would get for the first ten days of a trial). However, it goes up to a staggering $40/day for the following 39 days (where's that sarcasm button?) and $100/day after that (by which point you will have lost a lot of money through lost employment income).

There have been lots of jokes made over the years about owning two cows. In matters legal the old joke is about the two headed cow with two sets of udders...the client is the two headed cow and the udders are being massaged by the lawyers/solicitors...it's usually a very slow and comfortable massage with all the trimmings.

toMACsh said:

Actually, you've got it backwards.

My jury duty netted me $16 US per day. Parking was $10, leaving $6 for lunch, if you don't take into account that I owe income tax on the $16.

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Well I got loss of earnings here.

So that was £47.37 a day, for four days a week, plus 5 x £5.60 for travel. They also gave me £5.71 a day for food allowance. not bad I suppose, but I think I'm on the wrong tax code, so Mr Cameron will be getting 20% of that...

I didn't mean to imply that I had any money left over by calling it "net". That's before expenditures.

I got called once and I just acted really biased during selection, didn't get called luckily.

So in the end they only paid me for one week (and it was a week late... ) Kind of annoying but hey **, at least i got paid.

Marjamrob said:

I got called once and I just acted really biased during selection, didn't get called luckily.

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When you're the defendant, I'll act really open minded in the selection process, and then when I get picked, I'll nail ya!

Jury service, regardless of financial hardship, is sort of a requirement for a free and open judicial process. The idea of professional jurists sounds a bit disturbing to me. Though, in my experience, lawyers generally try to get the dumbest shrubs they can find to serve during the selection process. It's not exactly a "jury of one's peers", but better than some of the alternatives.

From what I understand, in PA only registered voters are called. But despite my wife and I having been registered since the time we turned 18 (16 years ago), neither of us have never been called.

I've always been interested in the whole process, but for some reason only our friends seem to get called.

XJ-linux said:

in my experience, lawyers generally try to get the dumbest shrubs they can find to serve during the selection process.

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YMMV.
I've been selected every time I made it from the jury room to the court room. I only have a Master's degree, but the one time that I was chosen as foreman, I believe there was a woman with a PhD on our jury as well. Of course, on the same jury there was another woman who didn't seem to have her brain turned on all the time.

I doubt intelligence has anything to do with it - "educated" people can be idiots and non-educated people can be brilliant. Trust me, I've seen both.

Only a master's degree? Don't sell yourself short - that's more formal education than a majority of the population.

I amend my previous post to go more along the lines of lawyers selecting those who fit their notion of being most readily influenced by speech and presentation, often to the detriment of critical thinking and examination of facts. My apologies in implying that jurists were selected based on relative stupidity as that was a rather broad statement. Clearly this is not always the case. My experience has been mainly with violent, felony and drug related criminal prosecutions. In the majority of those, the jurists seemed to be those who stated that they had free time, didn't know what was going on in the world, would willingly accept an follow a narrative and had little experience and/or interest with anything of a complex nature. Again not always the case.

XJ-linux said:

...didn't know what was going on in the world, would willingly accept an follow a narrative and had little experience and/or interest with anything of a complex nature. Again not always the case.

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It's scary - I find that this segment of the general population is slowly getting larger despite the increasing pervasiveness of Internet connected devices. But, that's a topic for another day.

Like I said earlier, I've never been called which is a shame because it might be kind of interesting. That's definitely a personal opinion for I can see how it would be a pain for others. As an example, I can imagine that parents (and maybe more so a single parent) would find it bothersome since no child care expenses are provided nor are parking expenses.