So...I feel like venting a bit today about the prospect of being called to jury duty. I believe that it is a citizen's duty and privilege to serve. We should all participate when called to do so. Yesterday I received a letter summonsing me to jury duty. I have to report on July 6, and I will be compensated $12.50/day. I am willing to go. And I think I would be an accurate representation of 'peer' as I am a typical, working person. However, I am not going to be able to serve. Why do I say this? I say this because I am not financially able to, and serving would be an undue hardship on me.
I live a modest life. I live in a modest house. I make enough money to live and have a bit left over. However, if I have to leave my job (which my employer is required by law to let me go) and serve on jury duty instead, I will lose, over the course of my service, at bare minimum, $700, up to about three times that much, depending on how long I have to serve and in what capacity. And if we account for the fact that the $12.50 I will be paid by the state will not cover my costs of going there, eating lunch downtown, and parking downtown, I am, in reality, losing more than that.
Kentucky law says that my employer does not have to compensate me anything for the time I will be away from work. Which, I don't know that I agree with that. If the law says they have to let me go, and I will be in Contempt of Court if I do not, the law should give me some security in that I will get at least a reasonable portion of what I would normally get. Whether the state pays that, or my employer, I'm not sure. But since employers have to pay other legal responsiblities because of an employee (unemployment, ss, etc), I think jury duty compensation could also be included. But I've gone on a tangent.
If I lose $700+ over the course of a month, I am going to be strained financially. I think I represent a good portion of the people in this society. If I can't make it, how do they expect people on trial to really have a 'jury of their peers'? People who are unemployed can go to jury duty without much problem. People who are retired can probably make it. People who make lots of money, or who have a spouse who does, and thus have more than one income coming in, can probably make it. But some of them can't, either. They NEED both those incomes to survive. In fact, that's why a lot of them have two incomes...they can't make it without either. So, are we really having a 'jury of peers' when the jury is made up of people who don't necessarily represent the majority of people in our current society?
I know that this has been going on for a long time. But I've never really thought about it before. For two main reasons: 1) I've never had to. The only times I've been called to jury duty thus far were when I was in high school and college. and 2) I didn't realize that employers didn't have to pay you. I knew that the courts paid you a set amount per day. I had no idea it was so incredibly low. I truely thought that since you were required to go, and that your employer was required to let you go without the fear of losing your job, that the employer was also required to make up the diference between what you would get at jury duty and what you normally make. I didn't realize that that wasn't the case.
So, because of this, I am going to have to try to be excused from jury duty. It's not that I don't want to do it. It's that I can't afford to do it. Serving will present an undue hardship to me, as I don't know that I can meet all of my financial responsiblities (without raiding accounts that I either do not or cannot raid without ramifications) if I lose that much money.
If we want people to serve on juries, and we want those on trial to really have a true representation of their peers in the society in which they live, shouldn't something be done so that it doesn't create such a hardship on those of us who, I believe, represent the 'typical' person in this society?
