I would have sworn that was a picture of Whitey Bolger.
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Yeah, that’s a pretty good way to avoid the real n-word that must never be said in court.
I have said something like, “I reserve the right to follow my own conscience as to whether the law is properly and fairly applied” and have been excused by the prosecution with no fuss whatever.
I would echo what @kennykb asked upthread. If I honestly believe what the defendant is accused of should not be illegal, should I lie about it in order to get selected?
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Based on a long personal history, lawyers don’t seem to want engineers in the jury box. I was bumped off one (in voir dire) when I mentioned that I would consider the possible effect of a low coefficient of friction; the civil case was one of slip and fall.
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Many of us belong to demographics that prosecutors will never allow on a jury, and for us “jury duty” means “going through annoying courthouse security” duty, then “sitting in a boring waiting room” duty, followed by “thank you you can go” duty, and functions mostly as a punishment for registering to vote.
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Answering honestly isn’t intentionally killing your chance of being on the jury…
I am familiar with jury nullification, am predisposed to distrust police testimony, answered all questions which were asked of me honestly, and still ended up on the jury, somehow.
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What I found most interesting was that there was IMO clearly a predetermined list from the start. The first 15 to 20 jurors were most definitely chosen ahead of time. Those at the end of the list were fodder for the drop outs of the original line up.
I could have been imagining things as there was plenty of time to come up with all types of scenarios…
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Perhaps it’s because I’ve only skimmed the majority of this thread but no one seems to have mentioned the main reason many people try to get out of jury duty; for lots of folks, it means a loss of money.
While they cannot penalize employees or prevent them from answering a summons, not all companies pay for time taken off to serve… and if they do, it’s often a pittance compared to the wages being missed.
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I will be thankful that Boeing had a specific time entry for that. But as I said I just burned some vacation days as I was coming up on a use it or lose it wall.
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is it ethical to lie about your beliefs in order to remain on a death-qualified jury?
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In a situation like that, you had nothing to lose but time; you definitely should count your blessings.
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I would hope that the employment relationship was probably pretty much at an end before hand and the associate was just taking the opportunity to get some revenge for years of billing targets before skipping off into the sunset for a quiet life of meditation and producing bad pottery.
On the other hand, I have come across some pretty self-absorbed lawyers who would have quite happily come out with that kind of thing without any idea of the consequences.
“You mean I’m supposed to take time out of the office, away from my lucrative and important cross border aircraft leasing contract work, to serve on your petty jury?”
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I’ve been on a jury 3 times over the last 25 years. The first time a civil lawsuit, the second time a DUI case (I was an alternate) and a year ago I served on a criminal trial that lasted about a week.
I honestly do feel it’s our civic duty to serve unless it’s a real hardship.
The last one I served on was especially important to me because we found the defendant not guilty.
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Where I live now, the summons now requires you to call in to an automated system nightly for a month. If you don’t have to come in after the month, you’re off the hook for at least a year. If you have to come in, you’re off the hook for four years, selected or not. The “come in daily for up to a month until you’re seated” was in another place and time. (My first call to jury duty was in 1975. When’d I get so old?)
Yeah. There was one voir dire when, after the routine questions (“where do you work?” “where did you go to school?” “do you know any of the parties?” …) the defender was careful to address me as “Doctor” on every question[1]. I’m sure that he was building some sort of case that I’d ignore the expert witnesses and judge the scientific evidence for myself - he asked something to the effect of, “would you let specialized scientific knowledge influence your decision?” I answered something like, “Much of what you’d call ‘specialized knowledge’ is glorified common sense and the life experience of a scientist - and it’s my duty as a juror to bring my life experience to the case.” (My suspicion - the case depended on dodgy DNA evidence.)
[1] I don’t ordinarily use the title socially, and work in a research lab for a Big Evil Corporation, where we’re so snobbish that we assume everyone has one. Once in a while, someone asks me, “are you a doctor?” and my stock answer is, "I’m a scientist, not a medical doctor. A PhD - ‘phony doctor!’ "
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There’s more to it than juries e.g. Adversarial vs Inquisitorial, juries in the form of lay judges in conjunction with career judges, appointed offices vs elected, decisional law vs codified law etc.
To reiterate: the US–American system or even the Common law system in general isn’t “the fairest decision making system” - most of this planet uses a different one.
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Indeed. I don’t even understand how that proposition could be seriously put forward. America has the highest incarceration rate of any country where reliable statistics can be gathered. There are a number of factors that go into that, but one of them is definitely that if you are poor and you are accused of a crime you basically can’t defend yourself. People who like the system may argue that’s because of perversions of it, but it’s perversions that have somehow flourished on a wide scale, so it comes back to a problem with the system itself.
But even in the ideal state the jury system isn’t that great for defendants. In Canada juries are only required for very serious crimes, for more minor crimes you have a right to request a jury. But virtually no one ever does. Lawyers will always advise you to go with the judge, because you are more likely to be convicted by a jury.
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You’re mixing a couple of issues there, though. The fact that most of the rest of the world uses a different system not involving juries doesn’t demonstrate one way or the other whether those other systems are more “fair.” As was pointed out, civil law systems also can use the jury system as well as common law systems, so which system not involving juries do you believe to more inherently fair than one involving juries?
I can’t speak to Canadian law, but that’s most definitely not accepted as common wisdom in the US.
Also, at the risk of speaking for the other poster, I don’t think the point was that the US criminal justice system was the most fair/just in the world, but that the system of using juries is as fair/just as one could come up with in the abstract, so we should try to make it work better by playing our parts. (if I’m misstating the intended point, I hope they correct me)
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It’s not fair to put words in someone’s mouth.
That wasn’t my argument and perhaps you’ll just read what I wrote - start with the rest of the post you quoted from.
It’s “common wisdom” because it’s a fact. Juries convict more than judges do.
I actually can’t understand what this means. What does it mean for a system to be the fairest one you can come up with in the abstract when in reality people have come up with an implemented systems that produce fairer results?
It’s not immediately clear that the Code Napoléon or the Codex Maximilianus is fairer, or less fair. All the legal frameworks nominally provide strong protections and all in practice have been horrifically abused. It’s obvious, of course, that inquisitorial vs. adversarial systems will have different standards of procedure. (The Anglo-American system is something of a hybrid; grand jury proceedings are inquisitorial, while all trials are adversarial.)
The abuses in the US system are obvious - most notably the atrocious enhancement of penalties for defendants who have the temerity to demand that the state prove its case. Most of Europe appears to be less perverse - irrespective of whether a particular nation follows Common Law or the Code Civil.
A factor that is not being normalized for is that guilty defendants demand jury trials more often than innocent ones do. In some states, the prosecutor can also demand a jury - which is more often than not, a sign that the defendant is being railroaded.
It used to be that the accepted wisdom in the US was, “if you’re innocent, ask for a judge. If you’re guilty, ask for a jury.” But a defender will often also have knowledge of how the judge assigned to the case conducts his trials. If Isaac Parker is your judge, you’d better ask for a jury, guilty or innocent! (If Roy Bean is your judge, forget it, the jurors are his drinking buddies.) Nowadays, the advice is often simply to plead guilty, because the sentence for the charges being pressed is so grossly disproportionate with the plea bargain offered. Nineteen cases in twenty end without a trial.
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