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Jury Duty; do you have to go?

I worked with a guy who lived in California for a couple of years. He never wanted to do the jury duty thing so one day he ran across a lawyer and asked does he really have to go appear for jury duty? The lawyer’s response was, “Well, it is your duty to appear for jury duty but...you can simply throw away the request.” When asked about throwing it away, the lawyer replied, “Because, there are no checks and balances and no way of tracking the mail.”

Well, I personally found this statement quite interesting. In the past 18 months, I have moved three times. Now I asked myself, if I move then how does that jury duty request form find me? The first thing I thought of was why is a jury duty request form sent by regular US mail? It is not even certified and there is no guarantee that it ever gets to me. So how can I be held responsible for something I may or may not recieve? Simple, you can’t be. The same law that forces a person to be served a sapina to appear in court, protects everyone. We all know how sapina’s are served don’t we?

Next, I decided to dig deeper. I made a call l from a pay phone and asked the supervisor lady who worked in the Fort Worth, Texas courts building how they track all the request forms that are sent out for jury duty. The lady got angry and belligerent and told me, “You have to show up, it’s the law.” Hmm, now I was really interested to get to the bottom of this mystery.

I decided to fill out a mail forwarding card. My hope was to see if I could get lucky and get a jury summons card that may have been sent to the wrong address. I did not have to wait long, I got one 2 months later. Into the lion’s den I went.

So there I am standing in line watching these people. Now I have to admit that the first two times I went I was 18 and 20 years old. I just stood there like a sheep and was practically dead on my feet and BORED out of my mind. But this time I paid attention. When I was almost to the front of the line I was listening and watching the conversation between the court\jury employee and the civilian. Now why does each person keep restating the information and correct inaccurate information every time. What is more curious is the court\jury employee keeps acting as if she was not even expecting nor knew that each person was showing up. It was almost my turn so I pretended that I could not find my card or my wallet. This way I could watch the whole scene twice more from right beside the computer in which all this info was being typed. You are not going to believe what I saw.

The computer screen had blanks on it. That’s right, the whole jury duty system is rigged to trick us to show up. The jury duty cards are mass mailed and there is no tracking mechanism to ensure that every card is delivered to each person. Am I to think that if I move to Europe for two years and then return that I may have two jury requests that have gone unanswered and I could go to jail for such? That is the stupidest thing I have heard. Further, we have been lied to for years about how we have to show up since it’s the law.

Have you ever wondered why you or a friend keeps getting a jury request form every 6-9 months or more or less frequently than others? I bet you, that these people always keep going down to the courthouse every single time. So they keep giving the new correct information and it gets entered every time. The goal here is to opt out of the system. Don’t let them get your name and address. Or, make it hard as hell to get a non-guaranteed letter to you.

Now I am not telling you to do anything. As my web site states, I am just sharing things that I have learned. Do with it what you will. All I can say is, “It sure is nice that all my jury requests get lost in the mail.”