Monday, June 8, 1998
Call of duty
Dealing with a lengthy process, $5-per-day pay and loss of time
make jury serving not very appealing
By Michelle Navarro
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Life is full of things that must be done – the laundry,
showering, making enough money to survive and, of course, paying
that massive phone bill. Who needs anything else to make it more
complicated than it already is? Well, there is one more thing –
jury duty.
When that landmark age of 18 is reached, doors are opened that
never were. It’s the world of nightclubbing, buying lottery tickets
and voting. The catch is jury duty. The minute you fulfill your
civic responsibility by registering, you become a potential
juror.
By law, the selection for the L.A. County court jurors must be
randomly extracted from a pool of names taken from the Voter
Registration list and the Department of Motor Vehicles’ drivers and
identification card holders list.
So unless someone has a burning desire to ride the bus his or
her entire life and doesn’t care to vote, the chances of being
summoned to jury duty are about as good as the chances are of
becoming a fifth-year student at UCLA. Pretty high.
Sadly, the way one is called to appear for jury service is on
the brutal side: they do it through the mail.
Anyone who is a college student knows how great it feels to get
mail. That’s why the majority of students subscribe to magazines,
catalogs and whatnot, so they can pull out a big wad of mail from
the box each day. Even junk mail is good.
However, what can ruin a perfectly good stack of coupons and
pizza ads, is that pink-and-gray rectangle – the jury affidavit.
Ugh. This is sent to the prospective jurors to establish their
basic, legal qualification to serve on a jury. This is also the
point where one may make a dramatic plea or excuse as to why they
should be excluded from the duty. According to the juror
information, the excuse must be "legally sufficient" in order to be
accepted.
In the 1995-96 year, 2.8 million affidavits were mailed out and
only 168,122 actually served. Usually, the satisfactory excuse is
financial hardship.
Unfortunately for students, going to school full-time is not a
valid excuse. So after a little while a potential Bruin juror will
receive the affidavit’s friend, the summons. From this point on,
one may either actually go and report or call to have the date
suspended.
"You can only postpone the jury duty up to four months, I
think," said Richard Pan, a third-year biochemistry student who
unsuccessfully used school as an excuse to be dismissed. "This I
have done on three separate occasions already. They’ve even sent
warning letters saying I’ll be arrested for contempt of court. Jury
duty sucks, that’s all I have to say."
Since the summons often conflicts with class, postponing the
date is often what happens. Sadly this means planning to spend the
holiday vacation doing the duty.
"This time they’re making me go for sure. I think the best thing
to do is not even reply," Pan said. "You will only get notes but
not the actual summons. It’s a pain in the ass."
Of course, if you are able to report at the specified time on
the summons you should go. Fourth-year applied mathematics student
Jason Parker did. When he arrived at the court, Parker sat and
waited in a room filled with other potential jurors.
"The judge comes in and says that this is your civic duty, that
it is something you have to do," Parker said. "He said once people
do it they usually think it was such a wonderful experience. Yeah
whatever."
After the judicial pep talk, Parker said they were shown a video
on the "thrill and wonders" of serving. From there it’s basically
the waiting game, an endless round of the "Jeopardy" theme
song.
"I made the mistake of not bringing anything," Parker said. "I
was so grateful people brought newspapers. I must have read the
comics about five times."
Every so often, a group of jurors are called into the courtroom
to watch the attorneys question a group already present inside the
jury box.
If any are excused, the spot is filled with someone in the
audience – sort of like on the Price is Right! The round of
questioning and weeding out continues until the attorneys are happy
with a set.
Parker was stuck in the room until 4:25 p.m., only a half an
hour before he would be excused, when he was called in. The
jeopardy music stopped.
But luckily for Parker, he wasn’t selected and got to go
home.
On another occasion, one student, Christy McConville, did get
chosen.
"Christmas break of my sophomore year I mistakenly fulfilled my
jury obligation," McConville said. "I could have easily avoided it
until at least the end of college. Yeah yeah, I fulfilled my civic
duty but really it was a huge waste of time. It interfered with
sleep."
The trial McConville served on only lasted one-and-a-half days.
A doctor was on trial for shoplifting a bottle of aspirin from
Costco. Apparently, the doctor’s main defense was his financial
status. In other words, why would he steal if he was rich?
"No one believed him," McConville said. "We convicted him in
about one minute. I just wanted to get out of there. I felt like I
was taking up a spot I didn’t want when there were plenty of
‘mature’ people there who obviously wanted the spot more than
me."
Nevertheless, just as Parker said the judge claimed, people do
come out of their service happy with the experience. Perhaps more
would feel the same way if taking time off to serve on a trial
didn’t create such problems at school or at work.
As it goes now, a juror is only paid $5 for each day of service
and is only reimbursed for the cost of gas for a one-way trip from
the courthouse to home. The law prohibits employers for terminating
anyone because of jury duty absences so the problem isn’t keeping
the job. It’s $5 versus another, much bigger paycheck. Or, in the
case of students, $5 for those few precious days of vacation.
"I couldn’t do anything for a week and a half because I didn’t
know if I was going to get called," Parker said about his winter
break.
However, even though Parker did end up devoting much of his free
time to jury duty, he still feels it’s something everyone should
experience.
"It’s something we should all be required to do," he said.
With so many trials happening every year, many students probably
will be getting that experience. In the 1995-1996 year, there were
6,378 trials held in L.A. County. The good news is that 70 percent
of them only lasted five days or less.
Who knows, maybe they will be well-spent ones. Or maybe they
won’t.