Is there any other way to get out of jury duty?

I prefer to show up slightly intoxicated, just enough to be noticeable but not enough to be held in contempt. Addressing people with dude followed by a little giggle helps as well.

I can’t help you get out of jury duty, but they would probably let you reschedule as you’ve already paid for the cruise.

I got out of it because I’m on a diuretic, and my frequent need to urinate would have been disruptive. If you have high BP or a desire to lose some water weight, check with your doctor about getting on a diuretic…I didn’t even need a Dr.‘s note, I just told them what drug I was on, why I was on it and what it did to me and they said, don’t bother showing up. And if you can’t do that, join the police academy!

I’d offer to make a baby with you but it sounds like it’d be too late. Sorry, Krysta.

They won’t let you off with the cruise?

Go in person and get the date changed. For personal reasons. Then, go and do your duty.

Where I live, you can opt to have your duty postponed for 6 months.

If you have booked the cruise, you let them know you will be out of the country certain days, and available others.

Just change the dates of your service for a time you are in town. We all have to miss work when we serve. Some employers will pay you while you serve. Check with yours.

@All – Thanks for responding so quickly. I haven’t asked yet to see if going on a cruise would be sufficient enough to be excused from jury duty. I will ask though because of course it’s already been paid for. Then i’ll see when I can change my jury duty date. Phew!

@TaoSan – Hahaha, has that worked for you in the past? ;P
@TenaciousDenny – Damnit, Denny! :(
@Divalicious – Where are you from?
@Marina – Thanks, I will definitely check with my employer to see what they offer.

Our always has an option for a 1 time deferrment. You tell them when you are available and they let you do that, no questions asked, however that is the local city level. I believe if you are summoned to the state level, it’s not an option. I live in CA.

In my district you are allowed to cancel your jury duty once for any reason, but they require you to give them another month when you would be available. Last year I was summoned for jury duty on the same week I was to be travelling to Mexico for vacation. They had no problem rescheduling me for another month (one that I chose). If you call at least in my experience they have been very accomodating.

Here in Texas, we cannot cancel our jury duty in the district courts, but we can reschedule it sometimes. You would need to go to the court master or whoever locally is in charge of sending out the jury summonses, or possibly show up on the appointed day and get in the excuse line.

I find it interesting that in our area you can be excused from jury duty for being the sole caretaker of a disabled person, but that the disabled person has to show up if it is their name on the summons.

I just didn’t show up once. They summoned me again later. No biggie.

@Darwin – That’s pretty strange!
@loser – I just noticed your new avatar, I lurve it!

Look for information about how to request a postponement.

What if it never came to you in the first place, things are lost in the mail all the time, I’m not saying to pretend you didn’t get it, but I bet people do that all the time and blame the post office.

Uh, so? Wouldn’t you want capable people to show up for your trial?
Dude, it’s jury duty. Not the end of the world.

And your cruise can be postponed. All I really got from this is that your vacation is more important than offering your services to the judicial system that was formed and works to protect you.

I don’t get why people hate Jury Duty, I was excited to go.

Just sayin’.

P.S. I still lurve you Krys. :)

in my experience (i worked with the DA’s office), the court and the lawyers doing jury selection are sensitive to issues like yours.

it will of course depend on what state and what kind of case, etc.

i suggest that you go to the court in person to straighten it out… sometimes the phone is just not gunna cut it.

one other thought is that if all else fails and you end up having to do the jury duty during your cruise time you can call ahead to the cruise line and tell them you were selected for jury duty, and you would like them to work with on rescheduling preferably for freeee!

but i don’t think it will come to that. (it is probably best to say that you will be “out of the country” instead of “on a vacation cruise”! haha)

It’s like a dentist appointment no one wants to go but you’ll get it over and done with. Plus you can smile big and say I did my duty. I found the whole process very interesting. You shouldn’t have to give up your vacation, people will work with you if they know the circumstances of your problem.
By the way in ny state only the
Judge can excuse you from a grand jury. It better be a great excuse. Good luck

@asmonet – The cruise is more important to me though! I neeed a vacation :( I know that sounds really selfish, right?… I actually wouldn’t mind going now, but the cruise can’t be changed, so that would really be a waste. I’m going to see if I can get it postponed because I do want to experience it, that’s if I even get picked from the jury selection process! So we’ll see what happens :)

I still lurve you too :D

I find jury duty to be interesting (with periods of great boredom) and I never mind serving. However, with that said, it always seems to come at a difficult time when I simply cannot spend several days or longer away from my regular life. I generally have to ask for a postponement.

The funny thing is when I do serve, I am rarely if ever picked. Somehow neither the defense nor the prosecution want me on the jury. The one time I was picked the same jury included two lawyers and a judge (unusual on a jury), and was a simple DUI. It settled before the trial really ever began so all we did was sit in the courtroom for a while and then sit in the jury room for a while, and then continue in that pattern for about four hours. At the end of that time we were told to go on home, and thank you.

In that case, might I suggest a Princess Leia costume and a funny accent?

@asmonet – HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! :D

Actually, some friends of mine always report to jury duty in full biker leathers. Even though their colors are from CMA (Christian Motorcycle Association) they still generally get excused.

@KrystaElyse

hehe, yupp, like a charm, twice already

NYC, you get one deferment that can stretch up to six months. Then you must serve.
You are called once every three years.

I served jury duty twice. Once was for a civil trial against the NYC Housing Authority, but was excused by the defense because I responded honestly about the conditions of the residence where I was raised (obviously, the defense doesn’t want anyone on the jury sympathetic to those complaining about shitty public housing).

The other was for a criminal trial for a guy who was accused of mugging and beating a drug dealer. The defense for that man asked me: “Can you look at this defendant, listen to the facts and judge him without prejudice?” whereupon this presumed innocent citizen turned to look me in the eye and snarled. “OH, HELL NO!” I burst out. I’m sure I saw the judge stifle a laugh.

I was dismissed immediately.

My husband got kicked off a jury for wise-mouthing the attorney who questioned him. I wouldn’t recommend that tactic, though. He didn’t do it to get kicked off. His mouth just runs ahead of his brain like that sometimes.

Don’t they always excuse someone who is in law enforcement or who has a close relative in law enforcement, and also anyone who has been a victim of a similar crime?

@Jeruba – They don’t always excuse folks involved with law enforcement. Otherwise I would never have gotten on any juries at all because my husband was a bailiff at the time, a form of Texas peace officer.

However, attorneys want to know if potential jurors fall into either of these categories, in case they might be biased one way or the other and thus could form the basis for an appeal. For example, a police officer, used to handling guns and to seeing the results of gun violence, probably would not be allowed on a jury trying someone for a gun-related crime, but could very well be on a panel for a trial dealing with a civil case.

Well its kinda the price you have to pay for living in a democracy. I mean if you ever end up in court you want a proper jury and not just a kangaroo court don’t you?

Ah, good point. I’ve only been on juries for criminal cases.

My first two experiences were good and made me glad I’d served. My third was horrible: everyone on the panel who was of the same ethnicity as the defendant (7 out of 12, as it happened) instantly and unarguably decided he was innocent. This puzzled me as much as the O.J. verdict puzzled me. Do people really think that members of their own ethnicity never commit a crime?—that if any member of a minority is accused, racism is the only possible reason? Even when a guy is caught in the act, alone, and (as it turned out) had been convicted twice before? I don’t want to start a war here. I just find it incredible that anyone would believe that all members of any group are incapable of breaking the law.

In any case, what I learned from that experience is that I don’t ever want to be in a position to have my fate decided by a jury.

My husband never has to do it, he always gets jury duty letters in the mail though.
The most recent duty, he got out of because he makes the most money and him missing work was impossible. It was considered an undue hardship.
But, he’s lucky…his father was the county public defender..he never gets picked.

@Jeruba

That’s why I believe that we as a society really should not have a jury system at all, but a judges only system like Germany or France. There are too many diversity-issues here.

The US penal system is broken beyond repair, flawed from first allegation to final verdict.

30 Rock
“The Funcooker”
Season 3 : Ep. 14 |21:29|
Liz is called to jury duty and chaos ensues on the set of TGS.

@TaoSan France still has jury’s. They were abolished in Germany in 1924 but I wouldn’t hold up too many decisions by Nazi Germany as being good for society.

Oh the Cour d’assises, I forgot. My bad. Dunno how to interpret the reference to Nazi Germany?

That’s like me referring to the honorable juries that hung people because of their skin color.

@Taosan, I know where you’re coming from on juries. I’ve heard many commedians comment about having your fates decided by 12 people not smart enough to get out of jury duty. But in all seriousness, the whole idea of juries really took a big hit in my mind when OJ was acquitted. I realized that there is an inherent problem of combining the standard of having to be found guilty beyond a “reasonable” doubt AND having what is reasonable be adjudicated by a jury of your peers. Basically, here’s my thought process.

OJ’s blood was at the murder scene, DNA proved that, and DNA evidence does not lie. Now maybe those people didn’t quite understand that, or maybe they actually bought the defense’s bullshit, which if you recall went something like this. 1) The LAPD is racist (this is a given among a jury of OJ’s peers…anyone who lived in LA at that time…aka OJ’s peers…was confronted with almost daily stories about how racist the LAPD was, their racial profiling at traffic stops, and let’s not forget the Rodney King affair was still fresh). 2) The guy who ran the investigation had one time been audiotaped using a racial slur, ergo, he must be racist. 3) The police being racists would “logically” love to frame a black man for murdering a white woman, particularly a famous one. 4) The police had enough time “theoretically” to have taken some of OJ’s blood and planted it at the scene before the DNA evidence was collected.

Now, as a rational person not living in LA, I said to myself, yes, some members of the LAPD are racist, but you can’t make a blanket statement like that without proof. This was taken as a given by OJ’s peers, the same way that if OJ had lived in the Ozarks and claimed that a UFO came down and killed Nicole and Ron, a jury of his peers might have damn well believed that it was plausible enough to establishe a…ding ding ding, “REASONABLE DOUBT”. To me the idea that entire LAPD would want to frame him because they were so racist that they wanted to take down a black celebrity and would go to those lengths, risking not only the integrity of the investigation itself, but the careers of whomever cooked up this plot if they were to get caught (because the timeframe was VERY tight and under that imagined scenario they wouldn’t have had more than a couple seconds to spare), that idea seemed preposterous…possible, but not likely enough to me to be considered a “reasonable” doubt. Yet, if I was innundated with stories of racism, particularly if I’d experienced some of it first hand (and as I recall, 9 jurors were black, and being stopped for DWB is, or at least was at the time, a fact of life in LA due to racial profiling), that might have seemed reasonable to me.

So I thought of a million scenarios where a jury of one’s peers might have a particular shall we say, set of prejudices which could be exploited by an attorney. Because after all, defense attorneys don’t get paid to establish the truth, they get paid to establish a reasonable doubt. If you know that’s reasonable in a particular community, you can concoct any story you want to offer an alternate explanation, and if you can demonstrate, to a person who thinks your theory is “reasonable” that it is also technically “possible” in that particular circumstance, your client will walk.

So, I agree with @TaoSan, my feeling is, who better to judge the reasonableness of something than say a panel of judges who actually undertand the intricacies of the law…people who are paid to judge what is reasonable or not? I’d feel much safer with a “reasonable doubt” burden of proof if the jury deciding what is reasonable were someone who were trained to understand reason, and not someone jerked out of their day to day lives and just asked for their opinion after being manipulated by an attorney who will do anything to get his client off.

And then there’s that famous quote—I can’t find it right now or remember who said it, but this was the gist of it: “Would you rather have your case decided by twelve members of the Harvard law faculty or the first dozen names in the Cambridge phone book?” Basically Everyman versus the academic elite. That is a very tough question.

I’d take academics any day.

@dalepetrie

Excellent! Exactly my point! Common law/case law, were a pretty progressive and “fair” idea at the time of their inception. The original intent was to depart from all powerful (usually aristocratic) judges.

The problem is, the jury system is very outdated, considering the bloated magnitude of our current day legal system, and the diversity of defendants.

The inevitable outcome, is a huge divide in the outcome/verdicts for same or equal offenses depending on if the defendant has the financial means to hire a “jury swayer”, or is merely solvent enough to get an appointed “mass processor”.

Kink Kong defense really does work in a legal system as overloaded as ours, and whilst according to to our government we are all peers now, in all actuality we’re really not there yet.

So it holds, I’d prefer a court comprised of legal professionals administering the process and subsequent (potentially devastating) consequences over some guys out of the phone book / voter register.

@Jeruba

Exactly my point!

@asmonet: I dunno… you keep getting academics and they’ll never agree and it will always be a hung jury. Seriously, 12 academics agreeing with one another?

If you’re guilty, how fast do you want ‘em to reach consensus anyway?

I typed Kin“k” Kong, lol

Hey, even huge monkeys go kinky at times…

And to top it off I was thinking “Chewbacca defense”.

@EmpressPixie – I would say that in my experience it would be no sweat to get 12 academics to agree on the facts. It’s opinions that are tricky. And in a trial, what we SHOULD be doing is establishing the facts. It’s just like scientists, if you demonstrate something, you can get 12 scientists who disagree on absolutely everything else to agree on what is demonstrated. If you can demonstrate someone’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, I’m wiling to bet that most academics would agree on it.

Just as an update, i’ve decided to go instead of giving an excuse. Hopefully it won’t interfere with my vacation at the end of the month.

@EmpressPixie

This is exactly the reason why prosecutors love “character witnesses” so much. The character of a person, or his or her disposition usually bear little “evidence” as to if something has happened or not. However, they use it to “shape” an opinion about a defendant to make their reasoning more plausible.

Same goes for defense lawyers of course. Unfortunately, the actual “facts” that need to be established are often obscured, because either defense or prosecution have successfully formed an opinion about the defendant.

@dalepetrie: I agree completely.

@KrystaElyse

ouw, I hope it works out for ya!

@TaoSan – Thanks ;o)