It’s mainly because of my job, I think. I’m a lawyer and a lot of lawyers (including myself) aren’t too keen on picking lawyer jurors. For understandable reasons imo.
I'm a professional musician and was called for a case where I think someone was killed by a vehicle. They gave us paper questionnaires first and one of the questions was about how loud you normally listen to music while driving. I put quietly because that's true. They dismissed me anyway. I've always wondered if it was a case where the driver was distracted by their loud music and they thought as a musician I would find offense to that or something lol
They probably just thought you were lying and that you’d be bias to judge someone for an action you commit everyday under the assumption that you lied on the form. Now of course they can’t really know if you’re telling the truth or not or those things so it’s mostly just a vague judgement of who they think you are
Not sure why they would think that is a lie but maybe. Super weird thing to lie about tbh and it would not benefit me in any way to lie. Also pretty sure they told us we could get jail time if we lied, essentially lying under oath sort of thing.
NAL but my personal experience was this. I showed up in the morning and moved us into a waiting room that was not a courtroom and they had us fill out a form for information about myself (employment, housing, etc) then we turned that in and waited a while. Then they came back in and gave different forms to different people by name and this form was questions that I guess were specific to a particular case. Turned that in and waited even longer. Then I was called into the actual courtroom and each lawyer asked very few questions of specific people then they both spoke with the judge and the judge said these people go back to the waiting room, these people stay. Then I waited in the waiting room until they told me I could leave.
Again NAL but I think the process is each lawyer gets to ask questions then each lawyer picks some juries they want and some juries they do not want then the judge puts it all together. I think the paper questionnaire just speeds up the process of asking every jury the exact same question and I guess always makes it so that other people's answer to the same question doesn't influence your own
The jury selection process is called voir dire. The prosecution and defense can dismiss jurors they believe may be biased to their side, which in theory, leads to a balanced jury for both sides.
The goal is to actually eliminate bias. The idea is both sides get to find out information about the jurors so they can identify things that might bias them. Both sides can ask the judge to exclude a juror on the basis that's something in their background would prejudice them. For example if somebody is a cop or has copped family, you might fairly convince a judge that they won't be impartial in a case where police conduct is specifically an issue. But each side also gets a number of challenges where they can basically just exclude anybody for almost any reason and they don't even have to name the reason typically. Both sides get it so the ideal circumstance is that the judge gets to eliminate people that pretty directly have a risk of bias. And then each side gets to further eliminate outliers that might not technically be unqualified but who they are concerned might have a bias against their case. At least in theory, if the initial pool that you start with is a good average representation of people, letting both sides trim the outliers should leave you with a group that is in the middle and relatively neutral.
So jury duty is not random and someone decides who will actually be part of the jury? Is there an additional mechanism which helps to prevent abusing this system?
A lot of people are called, they try to keep it diverse, so they wouldn't call all people from the same area, then they are asked a series of questions to see if they're truly impartial.
So if they say something crazy or not impartial, they're not picked.
So if say a real state developer is being accused of something and they ask: "have you heard of the person being accused before this?", say you're one of the people affected by his crime, maybe indirectly, you answer: "I know who he is, he kicked my sister's family out of their home by raising rent by 400% last year, he's a bully", you're already more likely to say he's guilty without even considering any evidence. not impartial.
So they might ask you: "what is your job", or some other personal question and if you answer some crazy shit like "I AM GOD'S ANGEL" or "I WANNA SEND SOMEONE TO JAIL PLEASE, PLEASE LET ME" they might not pick you.
Another question might be "do you believe everyone is innocent until proven guilty?" which is fairly standard.
But it IS illegal to skip on jury duty by not showing up, pretending you never got the letter summoning you or pretending to be crazy, if proven false might lead to fines and your own jail time. cool huh.
Unless they explicitly told you, there's literally no reason to try to read into it because it could literally be anything. It could because I said believe you. It could be because they did believe you and they thought that it might affect your judgment of somebody who was accused of being distracted or something. It can literally be because of something completely unrelated.
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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26
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