WanderALot
Full time employment: Posting here.
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2004
- Messages
- 607
So I got a Federal court jury summons in the mail yesterday. If I accept, I would part of a 120 member jury pool out of which 20 would be selected for a 5 month (!) trial.
There are several valid excuses for declining, including one option if you are a "valuable" member of company that would suffer if you weren't there. There's even an excuse if you are a professional such as a doctor or a lawyer. So, it looks like they are more open to excusing you than the traditional county jury summons. As an engineer in a small company, I was thinking about using the "valuable" employee excuse or the professional excuse.
My concern with using the excuse is that there's a note that says you may be called for another jury in 2 to 4 months and I'm not sure if they would accept the same excuse again. One of my friends regularly tosses these things (well, the county ones) in the trash because he says that they can't prove that you received it! Makes me a little nervous to do that, but I'm also worried that I'll be a sucker if I send in *any* kind of response!
So, the question is what would you do? I have 10 days to respond.
[rant on]
I can see the value in jury service and I think I'm less antagonistic towards jury service than the general population, but I can't understand how any court can expect you to serve 5 months on a jury! It seems like this is definitely the type of thing where we need some sort of professional juror pool.
[rant off]
There are several valid excuses for declining, including one option if you are a "valuable" member of company that would suffer if you weren't there. There's even an excuse if you are a professional such as a doctor or a lawyer. So, it looks like they are more open to excusing you than the traditional county jury summons. As an engineer in a small company, I was thinking about using the "valuable" employee excuse or the professional excuse.
My concern with using the excuse is that there's a note that says you may be called for another jury in 2 to 4 months and I'm not sure if they would accept the same excuse again. One of my friends regularly tosses these things (well, the county ones) in the trash because he says that they can't prove that you received it! Makes me a little nervous to do that, but I'm also worried that I'll be a sucker if I send in *any* kind of response!
So, the question is what would you do? I have 10 days to respond.
[rant on]
I can see the value in jury service and I think I'm less antagonistic towards jury service than the general population, but I can't understand how any court can expect you to serve 5 months on a jury! It seems like this is definitely the type of thing where we need some sort of professional juror pool.
[rant off]