Called twice and served once on a civil court case that took two days. It was interesting,
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Jury systems are used in lots of countries around the world with common law systems. The practice goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, and has a lot of advantages, one of which is having common folks as finders of fact, rather than state actors.
‘The more you know…’
But, it’s not the only way to do criminal and civil justice. I’m sure you have lots of ideas about how to do it more fairly. I would love to hear them.
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That’s a terrible way to run a selection system, and a good way to alienate prospective jurors. In most places, if you are not selected, you go back to the end of the line, and can’t be called for a good length of time, typically a year.
No!
The fact that the metaphor was used in service of something awful doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid example of speech that we would never allow under free speech.
It ought to be illegal, and in many cases is illegal under perfectly constitutional laws, to falsely report emergency situations that either divert emergency resources away from real emergencies or cause panic, stampede, and injury. That just makes sense!
If an idiot says the sun is coming up tomorrow, the sun still comes up. You still can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater (or at the very least you are responsible and injuries/deaths/false reports to the fire department if you do).
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I like the “fire in a crowded theater” example for the opposite reason it is usually offered, as it demonstrates how narrow the circumstances must be to justify a speech restriction. There are any number of reasons one can shout “fire” in a crowded theater without punishment: most obviously, there could actually be a fire, or it could be a line in a play, or it could be an obvious joke not taken seriously by anyone, or it could be unheard by anyone, etc. etc.
The fact that such speech can only be punished if it is actually false and actually causes a panic shows how difficult speech restrictions are to justify, not that such restrictions are commonplace.
Except, as Ken White points out in the linked piece, it doesn’t actually add any real insight to issue and almost always is used less than accurately.
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Thing which gets me is: why not just serve the duty?
Seems like much less of a hassle to just serve.
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Almost nothing anyone says offers any insight into anything, but we just keep talking.
People try to say abortion should be illegal by likening it to murder all the time. The problem with that analogy isn’t that murder is okay. Intentionally falsely reporting emergencies is not okay. If an action really is akin to intentionally falsely reporting an emergency, it likely is also not okay. If the analogy is crap, which is usually is, then it doesn’t support he point the person is making (though they may still be right).
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Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point of Mr. White’s article.
To echo what others have said, if you, dear Happy Mutant, are called for jury duty, and serving is not a financial hardship for you, please don’t intentionally torpedo your chances of being seated for a trial.
The one time I have served, one of the other jurors said that he didn’t think the defendant had proven her innocence and that therefore the half-baked police testimony should be enough to convict her. (This was a criminal trial in the USA.) Had I not been there to reiterate the concept of reasonable doubt (apparently the judge repeatedly explaining it to us hadn’t been enough) she’d have been convicted.
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His ploy seems to have worked.
Civil systems also commonly use juries in conjunction with judges in serious criminal matters.
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I have served on juries a couple of time since I cut my hair. When I was long-haired, they’d throw me off the jury no matter how hard I tried to be empaneled. For some reason, they assumed a guy with long hair would always sympathize with people arrested on drug charges.
In any case, post-haircut, I’ve served twice. One time was an incredible experience. The sum total of the “evidence” against the defendant was that he was driving an older model silver, gray, or beige Toyota or Nissan in a neighborhood near downtown LA and was wearing a shirt with a stripe. The police collared him forty minutes after the crime, about half a mile from the crime scene, and they never bothered to bring him back to the witnesses for confirmation until the trial (easily six months after the events in question).
All but two of us in the Jury Room were ready to convict, because, hey, the police said it was the guy. It wasn’t quite a 12 Angry Men scenario, but over three hours, we two convinced the others that there was not a convincing case, and so we acquitted the defendant.
Was he guilty? There’s a tiny chance he was, but the police work was incredibly sloppy. I felt like I had contributed to protecting a (probably) innocent man from very serious charges and long years in prison.
That’s why I’m always happy to serve on a jury.
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This sounds exactly like the trial I served on the jury of. Isn’t it crazy how willing people are to blindly trust police testimony, even when it’s incredibly sketchy?
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It may be an overused example but it’s not a “myth.” You really can be charged with a crime for yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. And that was just one example of the limits of free speech that I listed.
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I did check with my boss and a coworker who would be covering for me at the time as we were in the middle of a big project that I was heading up as far as the work my group was responsible for. I was kinda happy to get away for a few days really.
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This thread is turning into juror’s tales, so I’ll add mine to the list.
I was never called until I moved to my current city. Since then, they’ve called me about every 18 months, and I’ve gone through almost every possible permutation of circumstances without actually having to hear a case.
- There was the time when they dismissed my section of the jury pool the day before, because the previous trial was overrunning
- There was the time my employer managed to get me excused, because I was supposed to be on a training course in another country on the day in question
- There was the time when I actually had to turn up, was taken through into the courtroom to start selecting the jury, before being dismissed because the accused had pleaded guilty at the last minute.
- And most recently, when I went right through the process. All the hanging about (I had brought novels), all the balloting, empanelling, hearing about half the pool try to be excused, arranging to affirm, going through the details of the 17 different charges, balloting a second time because some jurors couldn’t try the case fairly, before finally not being selected at all. Not that I minded. It was a fairly horrible case and I would rather not have to have gone through the evidence for the two or three weeks that they said it would take.
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protesting against conscription…
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if you’re creative enough to invent an excuse to get out of jury duty, you’re creative enough to weigh the evidence.
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i try to have fun with jury duty. during one trial for which i was a juror i tripped up two older white guys bragging about how many times each had served as foreman of a jury by pointing to a pregnant, hispanic twentysomething and saying to the other two jurors (both black) that i thought she would make a great foreperson. full disclosure, i’m a middle-aged white guy with a strong liberal streak. the other jurors knew what i was doing and immediately agreed with me leaving the old white guys sputtering. the case had to do with a dispute between the management of a local retirement community and one of their tenants who had been trying to organize the other tenants for improvements in conditions. i convinced the other jurors that management had treated the woman so shabbily that instead of ordering that the tenant pay the $6000 in back rent management claimed she owed, we ordered that she had to pay $1. the look on their lawyer’s face was worth every minute the jury duty took out of my day.
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