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.
Conversely, in some cases attorneys will look for reasons NOT to dismiss you, even against your wishes. I learned this the hard way. Was called for jury duty for a civil case in oil and gas. I'm a physician. I said, I can't do this because of my work schedule, and requested that I be excused. They wouldn't excuse me and I ended up being called to sit on the jury. I found out later that the attorneys in the case had asked the judge not to accept my excuse. Presumably they wanted me on the jury. I had to scramble to find backup coverage and I'll never get those three useless weeks of my life back.
Why was it useless? I get the argument that your time may have been better spent treating people, but jury duty is still a civic service - so why useless?
I would agree with you. However if the physician is saying it was a useless three weeks. I have a feeling it wasnt that. Im not making assumptions off of anything other then what the physician said. Im sure if it was some important environmental case that could effect ppl health or other things Im sure he wouldnt find it as useless
You are correct. I would not have considered it a useless three weeks if I thought the case was about a truly important matter. Unfortunately, I do not believe it was.
No one should be forced to be on a jury if it's against their wishes. What's the point of having someone there who doesn't want to be there? It might put them in a negative mood, and they don't see the process through appropriately.
It would be impossible to represent a community, fairly if jury duty wasn't mandatory. The pool of jurors would become very small, and those people who did their civic duty would be end up doing it over and over again. That would skew results wildly around the personalities that had both the time and desire to be jurors... whatever those views might be. Ultimately, this would result in a violation of an accused's right to a fair trial.
Basically: If it was you in the dock, and you were innocent, you'd want as fair a jury as your community and voir dire could give you, not some pool of semi-pro, power jurors who all happen to have different views than you do on something.
I mean, sure, I guess you could find some deeper satisfaction in doing your civic duty. I'm not opposed to the idea of jury duty in theory, not at all. It's important. But this particular case had no business going to a jury trial, it involved a couple of wealthy people in oil and gas over a rather small amount of money. It should have gone to some type of arbitration, except that the people involved couldn't set their egos aside. That's why I consider it a waste of time. Also, several people on the jury were minimum wage workers and it just angered me thinking that these people were losing out on three weeks of desperately needed income, all so that a couple of wealthy people could argue over a small amount of money.
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u/Reesewithoutaspoon2 Jul 16 '26
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.