07 July 2011

Some thoughts on the debacle that is jury duty

1) Jury selection is necessary so long as we insist on using juries (I'm a little hopeful we could go to more online reviews of criminal cases). There are a lot of cases that get settled out of court of course.. which matters.
2) Juries should be selected a little more ahead of time, to prevent the inconvenience that it poses for the general public, what with jobs, day care, etc. This should be compromised with say a two week lead time by also removing more exclusions. The system used by my local federal court was completely designed it seemed to piss people off by not giving them a good idea whether they would be called in the next week until Friday. It should at least be available information the previous Monday. It isn't that complicated to use a computer programme to pull names out of a hat after scanning for routine exclusions or likely exclusions.
3) It wasn't even clear there was a big enough case load to justify the jury pool last month. Maybe they don't want the cases themselves individually identified to prevent jury tampering or whatever, but they should at least post a likely case load in terms of numbers of cases on their court website.
4) I still fully intend to try to get myself on a jury dealing with, in particular, drug cases. In order to nullify the convictions. There are other laws I might consider throwing out for civil liberties reasons or for political philosophical reasons as a form of civil disobedience, but considering there are thousands of laws on the books, it would be tiresome to list all of the ones I see as illegitimate morally and legally inconsistent with our civil liberties. And few of them are as destructive and commonly used as drug war laws.

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