(Host)
For socially responsible Burlington businessman and commentator Bram
Kleppner, a recent stint on jury duty ended up being more of an
education than a duty.
(Kleppner) At age 46, I recently got
called for jury selection for the first time. I served on two juries at
the Civil Division of the Chittenden Superior Court, and I learned an
awful lot.
The first thing I learned is that whenever you tell
anyone you’ve been selected for jury draw, they tell you how to avoid
getting chosen. But actually, I didn’t want to avoid jury duty. I’d
never served in the military, the Guard, the Peace Corps, or Americorps.
So jury duty would be a rare opportunity to serve my country directly.
Besides, if I were ever arrested, I sure would want a jury of my peers
to judge my story, instead of relying solely on a judge to decide if I’m
guilty or innocent.
The second thing I learned is why I went so
long without being called. It turns out that neither cities, nor
counties nor states (nor countries, for that matter), have a complete
list of their citizens.
So the judicial system uses DMV records
and voter registrations to create the pool they draw juries from. Anyone
who doesn’t have a license and isn’t registered to vote, will never be
called for jury duty.
Third, and here’s how I went so long
without being called, they don’t work through the list systematically.
Instead, an out-of-state computer makes a random selection each time.
Given the laws of probability, this means that most people will get
called a few times, some people will get called a lot, and others, at
other end of the bell curve, will go their whole lives without ever
being called once.
The day we did the jury draw, 120 potential
jurors gathered in the courtroom, and the out-of-state computer randomly
drew names from the 120 people there to compose juries for about eight
upcoming trials. Sure enough, some people in the room never got called,
and others got called several times.
Over the following few
months, I served on two trials. One lasted one day, and the other lasted
six days. It felt to me as though the process really worked. By the
time we jurors were called on to decide the cases, we had the
information we needed, we had discussed the facts thoughtfully, and, in
both cases, reached a unanimous decision.
I’d say that the only
real problem with the system is that jury duty pays $30 a day, which is
about enough to cover gas, parking and lunch. But trials can go on for
weeks, and for many people, the loss of income would impose a real
hardship. I’m very lucky in that my company pays for two weeks of jury
duty per year, and I’d encourage all employers to adopt this policy in
order to enable as many people as possible to make their contribution to
justice in our community.