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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 22 2012 @ 05:54 PM EDT |
When your jury pool is made up of people local to the court, which is supposed
to be local to the parties in the suit there is a fairly high probability that
there are ties between people and one of the parties.
Remember that on Groklaw you read about the high priority cases that typically
involve large companies and are going to be lengthy trials
The Judges have a lot of lattitude on what they accept as a hardship. The Judge
in the last trial I was on was being very hard-nosed about it. There is a set of
legal criteria that make it so that a potential juror legally must be excused
(vacation that has already been paid for with non-refundable tickets, caregiver
for young children or shut-in sick people, a few others). Extreme financial
hardship is a valid case, but the Judge defines "extreme". If being on
the case will cost you so much money that you will loose your house you will get
off the case, but if you have enough savings so that you can survive the loss of
income, the judge may or may not consider that extreme enough to dismiss you.
I've seen judges take the attitude that if you will loose income from being on
the case (i.e. the case is 3 weeks and your employer will only pay for 1 week of
being on a jury) they will let you out.
The bigger reason for people being booted off the case seems to be cases where
people have very strong opinions on the subject matter that they do not think
they can put aside, or have already made up their mind about the case based on
things they have already heard.
For example, if it's a drunk driving case, you really don't want someone who
believes that drinking any amount alcohol is a sin. Drinking is not against the
law and you as a juror are tring to decide if the person broke the law, and if
they did drink alcohol, but not enough to make them legally drunk, then they are
not guilty of drunk driving. Even with medical tests, this can be a question
based on things like the accuracy of the test, the time between driving and when
the test was performed, etc.
You also don't want someone who believes that the drunk driving laws are an
immoral intrusion on your private life and that unless you actually hurt someone
else, driving while drunk is fine.
I don't drink alcohol at all, never have. It's not that I'm morally opposed to
it, it just hasn't interested me and it's not something that my family ever did.
I'm fine being the designated driver for friends when we go out and they get
hammered, but I don't touch the stuff. My statement that I don't drink at all
meant that I got questioned carefully by both the lawyers and the Judge when I
was a candidate for a drunk driving jury. I could see the wheels turning in
their heads as they tried to decide if I was biased or not (I ended up being on
the Jury for this case)
You also don't want someone who thinks that all hispanics are drunken
gang-bangers if the defendant is mexican with lots of tattoos (especially if it
turns out that they are a gang member who was also arrested for violating parole
and is being held in jail during the trial with an armed deputy with their hand
on their gun in the courtroom for the duration of the trial)
In short, if people are not willing to listen to the evidence provided by the
parties, and the law as the Judge explains it to them, and evaluate if the facts
of the case are a violation of the law, they don't belong on the jury.
You really do want people who, if they knew more about the defendant would say
"this is a bad person" or "this is a great person" but will
still be willing to put that aside and decide if they are guilty of what they
are accused of in this particular case, no matter how good or bad they are
otherwise.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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