On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, Anonymous wrote:

Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse myself (I live in AZ), or if I do decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my conscious, aka jury nullification?

If you really do want to avoid jury service, mentioning FIJA or jury nullification ought to do the trick - it may get every juror within earshot excused, too, depending on how paranoid the locals are. But I think that's a horrible idea - jury participation is an opportunity to exercise much more influence than you wield if/when you vote in an election. All by yourself, voting your conscience as shaped by the evidence and the jury instructions, you can force a mistrial, which might or might not mean the end of the case. If your view of the evidence and your understanding of the law, as explained by the judge in the jury instructions, proves to be persuasive to your fellow jurors, you will collectively make the law as it applies to the parties in your trial. It's pretty difficult to overturn a jury verdict - not impossible, but it's harder than you might think from watching TV. Jury duty is, correctly understood, yet another of the "checks and balances" of the US legal system - if the legislators and judges are doing things with the law that the citizens don't like, don't support, or even just don't understand, it's an opportunity for those citizens to peacefully change the situation. Unfortunately, the jury duty process tends to select against people with the backbone to think for themselves; and people with backbone and strong principles often self-select away from jury service, because the bureacratic mechansims which surround it are confusing, annonying, and sometimes humiliating. If you can look beyond/around that, it's an opportunity to participate in the distributed creation of law and justice, which is a pretty big deal. Cypherpunks serve on juries? -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@netbox.com

At 08:30 AM 12/23/98 +0100, Some Anonymous Replay User wrote:

In 22 years of being qualified, I am facing my first jury duty summons as a regular employee and see no way out except to report. The old self-employment, financial burden exemption no longer applies.

Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse myself (I live in AZ), or if I do decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my conscious, aka jury nullification?

The Fully Informed Jury Association web page is http://www.fija.org/fija . They've been the primary organization promoting Jury Nullification issues for the last N years, and there's some good material there. The question I'd ask is why you _want_ to get off jury duty. Just to avoid wasting your time? Don't like courts or the current laws? Don't like having to judge other people? Generally cantakerous? :-) If the problem is wasting your time, how much time gets wasted depends a lot on your county. Most counties call far more people than they need to be potential jurors, just in case they need them, and take different approaches for winnowing down to the numbers they actually need for real cases. The place I live now makes you call a recorded message every night to see if your number's come up. On the other hand, a county I used to live in made you show up in person for the first four days whether you were needed or not, and this was before laptop computers so I couldn't do much work there. Another county I lived near makes the lawyers all show up Monday, and takes care of all the jury selection that day. On the other hand, if you are picked, and the trial is expected to take a long time, the voir dire process generally includes asking if this is going to cause a major hardship, which is why juries on those cases are usually made up of retired schoolteachers, retired military, and postal workers. But most county jury trials seem to be civil cases, like car accidents and such, which are usually pretty quick. For criminal cases, the job of the jury has always been to judge the law and its applicability as well as the facts of the case, regardless of what the judge and prosecutor tell you (though the judge's instructions on the law usually are relatively good advice.) If you think the law's bad, like drug laws, or being applied unfairly in the case at hand, or that the penalties are way out of line for the crime, you can vote not guilty, and you can try to convince your fellow jurors to do the same. Your duty is to vote your conscience. Alternatively, if you really want to get out of jury duty anyway, handing out FIJA literature in the jury pool waiting room and discussing the issues with your fellow potential jurors should either get you thrown out quickly, because they don't want your subversive kind around, and similarly, if you get as far as the jury selection process, being an intelligent and opinionated type often makes you an undesirable juror in either civil or criminal cases, so they may still reject you. But if you're the political activist type, rather than just trying to get out of jury duty, you can get stuck on some automobile accident or dog bite lawsuit where there's basically no FIJA issue at all and you're just deciding who's 65% at fault and how much pain and suffering their whiplash really caused :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639