The cold wash of unpleasant realization: In this particular case it was brought on by noting that the jury duty I had postponed three months ago had come back around again and I had let it completely slip from my mind. Until, of course, the last minute.

Jury duty is something that I have fairly strong feelings about. My opinion is that too many people who would make excellent jurors skip out on it because it is too problematic for them to contribute their civic responsibility. More on that in a second.

My particular experience with jury duty has been that the couple of times I’ve been called, I always end up in one of the later groups so I call and get told to try back tomorrow, I call the next day and get told the same thing, I call the third day and get told “Thanks, we got our jury.” So despite me thinking that I should be contributing by being on a jury, I have never been asked to. I’ve never even had to go into the courthouse. In this case though, my group number is insanely low so the odds of me not going down to the courthouse are roughly 2,975,468,211,391,261,996 to one.

When I worked at the City, jury duty was like a happy vacation. By law or, perhaps (and this is a long shot) by logic, civil employees receive their full pay from their particular agency when they serve jury duty. When I got this notice I was still working at the City. I was actually quite excited about the prospect. I would get to do something new and different while collecting my regular paycheck, plus I’d be acting like a responsible citizen. Win/win/win! Of course just before I was supposed to call in the first time I switched jobs. Nik called the courthouse for me and told them I had a brand new job I couldn’t fail to show for and they granted me a three month extention.

Now I’m conflicted. My current job does no such kind of salary matching for time spent on jury duty. I suppose I could use a few vacation days during the process to make sure I get some money, but if the trial were to last longer than, for example, Wednesday, I’d be pretty much limited to whatever the pay for jurors is ($5 per day or something?). This is a legitimate problem since with Nikki being out of work due to her back injury, we’re mostly doing the one-income thing. And that means that me spending several days or weeks getting 16% of my salary is going to cause a problem.

But that puts me into the position that I’m sure most regular folks find themselves in when it comes to jury duty: In an abstract sense I want to be a part of the justice system. I think it is important to do that so that our juries aren’t populated exclusively by housewives and retired teachers and welfare recipients. I think too often complex judicial issues are handled in a less than ideal way by prosecutors because the common consensus is that juries will get lost and call their own confusion reasonable doubt. I’m not trying to suggest I’m better or more capable than any of the people I listed, but diversity is an important part of an effective jury. When all that lawyers can count on from any potential jury is that 85% of them will cite Oprah as their primary source of world news, trouble abounds.

Yet it is precisely the people like me who just might offer a bit more roundness to a jury but I’m in the same boat as all the other educated and critially thinking (stop that laughing) individiuals: It may be a responsibility but it isn’t one they make particularly easy to uphold. I think I’d be a good juror. I want to serve as a juror. Doing so would be a major headache for me. So what are my options?

I can lock it up and do the whole sacrifice thing, or I can go in there on Monday and tell them the truth: The system is broken because it offers me no choice but to claim exemption due to personal difficulty.

Here’s how I think it should work: First I think the courts should pay a semi-decent wage. I just checked and our local court pays $15/day and $0.34 per mile traveled. That’s like $1.86 per hour. Hello? Minimum wage in the US is $5.15/hour and in California it is $6.75/hour. That means that at the very least we should be giving jurors $41.20 per day and in California they should be getting at least $54.00 per day. I think what should happen is that jurors should get their state’s minimum wage and there should be a mandate that requires companies to pay their employees’ full salary (minus the amount granted by the court) for a reasonable period of time. I don’t know how long the average court case lasts, but I’m guessing two to three weeks minimum should cover most trials. Of course this should only apply to those chosen jury members and alternates. I don’t mind losing a day’s pay to fulfil my civic duty during the jury selection process, I just don’t want to have to sit there and pray I’m not chosen the whole time.

Of course you want to avoid having people act as full-time jurors and limit the possibilities of people actively making money from serving on a jury. So I think what should happen is that as a condition of getting a driver’s license you should have to take a basic law course and pass a simple test. I’m not talking some massive law-school type gig, just a three or four hour seminar and a test no harder than the written DMV test to make sure you at least get the basics of the law and understand what it means to be a juror. Once you do that, you get a juror’s license (and are then eligible for the driver’s license). Instead of the seemingly random summons that come whenever is least convenient, this license mandates that you have to report for jury duty once every year (which can be voluntary or via summons and doesn’t mean you have to actually be selected). But, it also guarantees that if you get onto a jury you are exempt from having to serve for two years after that date. In fact you are prohibited from serving on more than one jury every two years. So if you show up voluntarily and aren’t selected, you won’t be summoned for a year. If you don’t show up, you can count on one summons per year. (Obviously these times can be adjusted based on the number of potential—licensed—jurors and the number of cases.)

The third thing is that people on unemployment, welfare, possessing a felony record or whose driver’s license is suspended or revoked have their jury license taken away. Not having a jury license doesn’t mean you can’t drive, only that you can’t renew your driver’s license until you get the jury license reinstated. Of course being on a jury becomes semi-voluntary here because if you used nothing but public transportation you could get away with never serving. That’s fine. You don’t have to register to vote now, either, and as I understand it that’s how they get you as it stands today.

The whole point of all this is to encourage people to become more involved so we don’t get stupid, racially motivated verdicts or ignorant rulings because the jury pool was so shallow one side or the other was able to effectively manipulate the outcome. If it was less of a potential burden to the individual (regardless of situation) and you could be reasonably sure that any of the potential candidates had at the very least a half an inkling of what the judicial system was all about, I’d say that would be mission accomplished.

Today’s Moment of Stupid Windows Zen

Brought to you by Lister.

There is no default keyboard shortcut to minimize the current window. The closest you can come is ALT+Space and then ALT+N. Also, there is no direct shortcut to maximize a window selected in the taskbar; except the painfully clunky ALT+Space followed by ALT+X.

Oohhhhhmmmm…. that’s paaaaants…. ohhhhmm…