At jury duty. No Wi-Fi. Hoping my law degree gets me dismissed; if I miss the first two days of the NCAA Tournament for this, I will cry.
At jury duty. No Wi-Fi. Hoping my law degree gets me dismissed; if I miss the first two days of the NCAA Tournament for this, I will cry.
No offense Brendan, but I hope having a law degree does not get you dismissed. I don’t think that what our country’s judicial system so desperately needs is less competent jurors…
It is not so much an issue of the judge dismissing for cause / courtesy, though I recall one of the Supreme Court justices was called for jury duty and was dismissed by the judge as a “courtesy”, though I would imagine it had more to do with the judge not wanting to hear a cough from the jury box every time he sustained or did not sustain an objection.
But in the case of someone with a law degree, generally the issue is that the lawyers for both sides will generally object to the person being seated as a juror, because they don’t want a lawyer in the jury room.
DCL, you and Brendan clearly understand this issue more than me. But explain the negative of having a lawyer in the jury room. I guess it would prevent the plaintiff’s or defendant’s lawyer from tricking the Jury into not understanding what the rules were, but wouldn’t the opposing attorney try to prevent that anyway? In other words, wouldn’t having a lawyer in the jury room be a check against dirty tricks by either side?
I don’t see what everyone has against jury duty. Other than ridiculously lenghty trials I think its a good thing that we have to be involved in the system and I actually enjoyed my one opportunity so far to serve.
Short of being seriously inconvenienced by serving (and we should have as much protection in place to prevent this) or being clearly unable to render a reasonable verdict (I can’t judge him fairly, he’s my daughters cheating ex-boyfriend, etc.) i think people should have to serve.
The issue most lawyers see is that having a lawyer in the jury box is a very dangerous wildcard; you have no way of knowing what they are going to do, or what pice of minutia they will decide is controlling for the case. Which is somewhat true of every other juror. Except for one rather important caveat. You know there is a very high likelihood that a lawyer is going to lead the jury, and the others are exceedingly likely just to follow. Because, well clearly if (s)he is a lawyer, (s)he must know the law better or what have you. And it is possible that a lawyer would “over rule” the jury instructions, etc. For example, if Justice Souter were on the jury with you, you’d likely defer to his explanation of what the law says over either lawyers (after all, he doesn’t have a dog in the fight so to speak) and you’d take it over the judges, after all he is on the supreme court.
So at the end of the day, a lawyer in the box is seen as dangerous, and a variable that can be controlled by keeping them out of it. Also, big as it is, the law is not that big of a profession, so the potential for conflict of interest is also rather high.
As to David’s point, I mostly agree. But the reality is, for some reason, people really don’t like serving on juries…