Jury Duty: They're Making It Easier
Showed up at 7:45 this morning at Orange County Superior Court for jury duty. In my 18 years since being an eligible juror, this was the first time I actually had to show up. Every time I was called in Texas, I had just moved cities or counties and by the time my new address caught up with me I had moved again. Every time I have been called in California it was for "dial in" to see if they needed me, and they never did.

So for my first time to actually show up, I was pleasantly surprised. Orange County provides study carrols with power outlets and phone lines for laptops, and they tell you on the juror form, so I brought mine along. The only thing missing was a WIFI connection, but I made do. I tried dialing in to "blog from the courthouse", but I never established a connection, so I just worked on some reports that are due this week.

The first 1.5 hours I worked while they asked for "volunteers" who were free for long trials. They had trials scheduled for 30 days, 20 days and 10 days and reminded the 500+ of us sitting there that jury duty is compulsory and not voluntary. The only excuses they allowed to get out of these trials were if you had an employer who did not pay during jury duty, were a student, or had to take care of someone. Basically retirees, home makers and people who could take off from their jobs were hosed (why couldn't they have called me when I was on my LAST job?). I don't know what my current employer's guidelines are, but you can bet they would not want me gone for that long, so I sat and worked while the clerks processed everyone who was eligible.

After that, I was called with 50 others for a "normal" trial. A panel of 18 was assembled in the jury box and the rest of us sat in the court room. The judge then gave the timeframe - 4 days - and asked if this would inconvenience anyone. About 12 of us raised our hand and the judge quizzed us, telling us we would be "deferred" and would have to show up for jury duty again in a month. After meeting in chambers with the lawyers (it was a criminal trial), he came back and excused us, but instead of being deferred, we were to check back into the jury pool to be called in for other trials. Luckily, the clerks didn't need us, so they sent us away with a certificate saying we served out our term of jury duty, even though we were excused by 10:30am.

So I did my civic duty by spending a couple of hours in the court house on my computer from 7:45-10:00 and 30 minutes in a courtroom getting excused by a judge - not a bad deal. On my juror opinion card I asked them to add WIFI, which would make serving really easy.

posted by Director_Mitch @ 12:53 PM (Permalink)
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