Judge, I'm Gonna Be Starting Something

Should I work on the game project, my meeting prep, cleaning up my office, my website revisions, or my first blog?

Blog wins. First topic--Jury Duty.

Why?

Guess where I had the time to make a few notes.

For the record, I think jury duty is a good thing. Most folks should do it instead of trying to get out of it. If you ever had the misfortune of being in court would you want to see folks you think are reasonable in the jury box or all the folks that spend their days watching:

• TV justice (pick your favorite judge)
• the 58th rerun of ______
• the third DNA test for that baby's daddy
• talk show host ___ discuss teen serial killers who each lost 80+ lbs in less than 6 months

I don't want these folks making up the majority of the jury pool. I do want reasonable people there. I was called into the courtroom with about 50 other folks. During the time we waited, lot's of things happened. It took 1 1/2 days to pick the jury. Most individual parts of that time were done in about 10 minutes. The group activities took about 45 minutes. So most of us got 2 days jury pay for about an hour of work and a lot of waiting.

I did not get selected. I was glad because I needed to be in NYC a few days later. The judge said the case would probably take a day or less. Reading between the lines, the defendant was either very guilty or very innocent. Someone (witnesses/alibi?) was going to make this one easy.

Here's an idea to make this work a little better for all of us.

Send everyone a jury summons at the same time. Let us phone in or use the internet to pick multiple dates (say five one week periods) that should work for us to serve. Fill the waiting room when it appears to be good timing for the jury folks. Backfill spaces where you are short with the regular method for all those people who were too busy to call in or login.

Put people to work on the first morning. Keep us busy doing something. If you are not put into a jury pool, let me learn something about how the courts work in my town/county. (Remember, that jury pay comes from your taxes. Get some value out of it.) You could put 500 people though the group part of jury selection answering questions for a bunch of (5-15?) trials at one time. Maybe I don't fit trials #3, 6 or 9, but would be a good juror for #2, 5, and 10. Now you can start individual questions with potential jurors that qualify for the lowest number of trials.

With creative thought and some wise use of technology, jury duty could become more effective and efficient.

There are other ideas to update this process from folks that know more about it than me. I am not a lawyer. I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I just know there should be a better way to impanel a jury when the stakes are quite high for the people in court.


Michael Jackson gets credit for the title. The song has nothing to do with the post--unless you were actually in my jury pool. In that case you say, hey wasn't that case about...