This is actually quite well-studied. It’s called the Turding-Extruder Effect.
8 Likes
Pic is unmistakably from the movie version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, if anyone’s wondering. (I confess that I never actually ventured to find out what the scene in question looked like, but I guess I know now.)
As for the judge, he can’t possibly be the only one in the country speaking to jurors like that.
2 Likes
That is actually a very disturbing outcome. As it guarantees only a certain (likely well-off) subset of jurors can sit on a longer case.[quote=“crenquis, post:15, topic:86631”]
The judge asked those whose employers don’t reimburse them to stand up and then asked each one if a x week trial would cause them financial hardship.
[/quote]
What should happen here is if the answer is yes, the state pays equivalent wages and they stay on the Jury.
In fact that should happen regardless. Financial status of the juror should have no impact whatsoever.
(bear in mind i’m not a USA resident, so please correct me if i’ve overlooked something)
6 Likes
Most of the jurors seem to end up being State/Federal employees, employees of relatively large corporations that pay for jury duty, or retirees.
6 Likes
Quite possibly, but that does nothing to invalidate my point here.
If you’re chosen for Jury duty, your job/wealth status should not matter at all…
5 Likes
Jury of your peers and all that…
But I can’t see that working unless the state/city/etc recompenses jurors at the rate they are losing out. Or pays all jurors a good salary. But there are objections to people getting paid to do jury service.
Yes, it’s a civic duty like voting is, but if you don’t get paid for your time (I would, if I ever got called), I can see why people want out of it (on top of all the other reasons).
2 Likes
peers: (from wikipedia) “An equal in age, education, or social class, as in peer group or social peer-to-peer processes” No mention of ‘must earn more than the defendant’ or ‘must be of higher social status than the defendant’
I can see why some people wouldn’t want to do it for personal reasons. But i can’t see any valid reason at all to disqualify them because of their financial status…
5 Likes
Didn’t intend to be any refutation of your apt point… Just an observation.
4 Likes
Being a complete prick with no capacity for empathy should be enough to disqualify anyone from a judicial role, in anything approaching a fair society… but of course, we’re nowhere near anything of the sort.
Meanwhile, arseholes like this somehow continue to convince themselves they’re living in a meritocracy… what a fucking poisonous myth that is.
6 Likes
I agree with what you said, but have a couple of thoughts.
I can understand why people would object to, for example, a doctor who has both higher income and concomitant cost of living (bills, malpractice insurance, ect…) getting paid more than a construction worker who has lest standing income and thus smaller standing costs of living. I think there should be a minimum, and that it should be based on a base rate plus dependents. It’s reasonable to expect higher earners to have a buffer.
I’m no legal expert, but I suspect the usage here is a slightly older one, i.e. common people having a right to a trial by other commoners rather than judges appointed by an aristocracy as was once the norm in Europe.
5 Likes
Either you pay them the going rate they’d be earning instead of performing jury duty or you don’t…
I wouldn’t argue that some people are ludicrously overpaid (but i would not include the medical profession in that) but that is an entirely separate issue…
Simple end of the day outcome: a person on dury duty should earn what they should in a week on average. At minimum, minimum wage.
Pay it from tax, for they’re doing a public service. The wealthy will cost more, but as they’re the statistical minority it still evens out…
4 Likes
The alternative is giving the wealthy an inflated influence on justice, that is far worse…
2 Likes
Yeah, bad example on my part. Some doctors are overpaid, some are definitely not. And the division is a bit different in the US than in the UK, where most doctors work for the NHS (but that’s a separate rant about the very different failings in both healthcare systems and not pertinent here).
I think you touch here on a way it could work. I’m pretty adverse to all the tax loopholes exploited by the wealthy, but I think this would be a place where allowing the wealthy to deduct jury duty expenses would serve a public good.
2 Likes
Not perfect, but the way we handle it here:
https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/courts/jury/general_jury_duty_info.php
2 Likes
When I was (effectively) a legal page for my father, lunch was a slow affair with a bunch of other lawyers at a local Italian place. Definitely not expensive. They were all in private practice though, so it wasn’t exactly corporate ($$$) law.
2 Likes
No pay for the first 10 days?
If I remember correctly, I get ~$16.50 US per day ($15+~$1.5 travel) for any days beyond the first day. I got a decent rate for the capital murder trial – since I was about the 3rd person they excused when they brought all 400 of us in the second time, I probably earned ~$90/hr 
1 Like
I agree with the idea in principle, but in practice we don’t have enough money to do this. Nearly one percent of our total population is incarcerated, and we tried to incarcerate even more than that. Getting that many people into jail requires an awful lot of juries. There aren’t enough dollars to reimburse them all.
Thanks! Came to the comments hoping someone would mention where the heck that pic came from… makes sense.
1 Like
Worth watching if you haven’t seen it, BTW. Genuinely good film.
You have more than enough money for this, all you need to do is scale back the pointless ‘war on drugs’ that does far more harm than good (both in costs and prison populations) then you’ll have plenty resources for actual useful things.
3 Likes
