April 19, 2004
Jury duty in Baltimore
What a surprise. Not even one third of the Baltimore residents summoned each day to jury duty actually appear, according to an article in the Baltimore Sun (April 19, 2004):
Nationally, poor juror turnout has reached a "crisis level," according to the Washington-based American Legislative Exchange Council, an information clearinghouse. Jurors avoid service whenever they can - and even when they can't, according to the council.
The article does little to explain the fury of the average Baltimore citizen, especially the self-employed, toward the jury system.
First of all, the city demands you be at the courthouse at 8 a.m., where pretty much nothing happens for two hours except that you get processed and exposed to some awful third-tier video from Blockbuster on the closed-circuit TV.
Then you get called in to a big room for jury selection. Most of the time, it is to listen to the judge describe that you are being considered to hear the case along the following lines, where some congenital liar with dollar signs in his or her eyes claim that an MTA bus hit them. One feels miles away from any feeling that one is doing one's civic duty to protect the innocent from murder and mayhem. No, it is more often a bunch of litigious nonsense from scam meisters, inventing tales of falling into uncovered manholes etc., who hope that a claim against a public agency will help them buy a new sofa.
Think I'm being cynical? Then you haven't lived in a declining city with a population so evenly divided between law abiders and law breakers, and with so many scammers exploiting their right to a trial by jury, that jury duty becomes onerous.
Some jurors with salaried employment no doubt look forward to a jury duty as a break in their routine. People doing day work or self-employed, such as myself and others, can usually be found complaining to high heaven, however, about losing a day's time for cases that are pure nonsense.
If you actually get on a jury, for a real criminal case, you can usually count on one, two, three or four jurors to ritualistically chant, "Police lie, they lie," so that the merits of the case often have little bearing on the verdict. This is another manifestation of the deep split in this city between law abiders and law breakers, and the many who live in the grey in-between world of scamming.
Further thinning the jury pool is the absence of Appalachian whites such as some of my neighbors who do construction work. One of them told me he wrote a letter to the jury supervisor saying that he couldn't be on a jury because he was "prejudiced." Another chimed in that he went in person to the courthouse to make the same claim. It's one way to get out of jury duty.
What's the answer?
- Not wasting the jurors' time with nonsense civil suits.
- Wasting less of the jurors' time by making them get to court hours before screening begins.
- Going to the system of six jurors vs. 12.
Citizens have voted by stubbornly doing everything in their power to avoid jury service. The court system needs to fix itself by looking into the reasons why.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:42 PM in The Neighborhood
