Originally Posted By: JeepWJ19
Get off his back. Not everyone feels an extreme amount of Nationalism and Patriotism to WANT to go to jury duty lmao.
OP it would not be wise to skip court. Sometimes you luck out and are not even selected. Bite the bullet and get it over with.
Jury Duty is kind of a joke in this country... it shouldn't be but it is. Because only losers seem to show up for it.
But I don't mean it the way it sounds! What I mean is that the people that really need to show up - the intelligent, those that care about justice, those that give a [censored] whats going on in the local justice system are usually gainfully employed and in some states can't even afford the time off. (When I was called for Jury Duty I was reimbursed _$5_ per whole day - yes less than one hour for McDonalds, I also had to pay to drive myself which cost me about $6 per day though. I was then taxed on the $5 as income at the end of the year...
)
The people I saw there depressed me so severely that I was convinced justice was dead in my country. These are my peers?? People that didn't know anything, people that were subject to the most transparent of manipulations by either the defense or the prosecutor. I was universally thrown off most of the time by simply being the only person asking intelligent questions (which I thought I was supposed to do) and later when they realized I knew of jury nullification and actually had the audacity to correct the judge that we were the ones judging the applicability of the law whether it was being fairly applied or not I must've been labeled a troublemaker. Once I was even thrown off by both the defense AND the prosecutor over the same case! (I guess they decided I was either such a wildcard or smarter than all of them plus the judge that I might end up having them all called in for miscarriage of justice??)
I listened to "public pretenders" so incompetent they sounded like they were boringly reading off a script on a D-grade middle school theater play. I watched annoying slick prosecutors find excuses to take me off future cases once they realized I was the only thinker there and talked of jury nullification yet I came back to watch the cases without me at least in part that I was no longer a juror on and wanted to stand up and yell objections for the defense that the lawyer wasn't. I watched stupid entitled rich kids with slick lawyers emotionally manipulate the jurors into letting them off over transparent excuses seeing the two class justice system in effect.
At the end of the experience I was left with the feeling that it would be nice to make a difference but that it's such an uphill battle that it's not something I would care to do again with my time. Like donating my time to help the homeless at a soup kitchen, it's something that ideally should probably be done, but feels like a drop in the bucket in a hopelessly large problem that's just getting worse no matter how hard I resist it anyways. Which makes me say "time for Plan B since this wont change it anyway".
