The Use of Free Labor
jury duty
Week before last I was up for jury duty, instructed to check a web page twice a day to see if they wanted me to come in. The first two days they did not, the third day they did.
I was told to come to the south county courthouse by nine in the morning; so were more than eighty other people. When we arrived we were directed to a room, told to wait there to be told what jury room we were to go to. We spent most of an hour waiting then were all sent to the same jury room.
Once we were seated the judge told us about the procedure for selecting jurors, including the option for avoiding this trial if participating in it would be a hardship. He added that he expected this case to only take a week or so, with a break for Thanksgiving, and warned that getting excused from it might lead to being assigned to the civil case between Apple and Samsung which he expected to last more than a year.
After asking us all to swear to tell the truth in answering questions relevant to our qualifications as jurors he told eighteen, selected at random, to enter the jury box for voir dire, the procedure by which the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney decide which potential jurors should be eliminated from the pool and sent home, which chosen as jurors and alternates for the trial.
The voir dire started with a long list of questions distributed to all eighteen and then read aloud to the first candidate juror in the jury box for him to answer, with further questioning by the judge based on his answers.1 Some were on general background: what he did for a living, what children he had and how old, what experiences he had with the legal system. Others were to identify potential sources of bias: whether he had any connection with one of the parties, one of the attorneys, the location where the events occurred, whether he knew any lawyers or judges, whether he had any views with regard to the sort of events that were alleged to have happened, whether he had ever been arrested or had any other contact with police. All eighteen were given the written list of questions and asked to answer all of them although they were only read aloud to the first. Positive answers resulted in further questioning: the candidate’s view of lawyers, judges, police officers, knowledge if any of the law — one candidate was a lawyer — much more, depending on the answers to the initial questions and the follow ups. One candidate, I think only one, was eliminated during the judge’s questioning and told he was free to go home. Further questioning was then done by both attorneys and a few more candidates eliminated.
Early in the process we were given an hour and a half lunch break, twice during the day another break, nominally half an hour, actually an hour. Before the questioning of the eighteen candidates (plus replacements added and questioned when one of the initial group got eliminated) was completed we were told that we were done for the day and sent home, with orders to return by nine thirty the next morning. A few hours into the second day the questioning was complete, with twelve jurors plus, I think, two alternates, selected; the rest of us were sent home, having satisfied our jury obligation for the year.
Free Labor
What most struck me, as an economist, about the process was the implication of its having access to nearly free labor — there was no payment for the first day, fifteen dollars a day thereafter. The courthouse was towards the south end of the county, about half an hour’s drive from me, forty-five minutes from the north end. We were told that the jurors were selected at random, with no attempt to select jurors for cases in the south courthouse from the south end of the county — because doing that would have biased the selection, how was not explained.2
Out of more than eighty of us called in only about twenty-one were put through the voir dire process. The rest were presumably there in case more were eliminated, but it is hard to see how that could justify calling in that many. A jury system that took the value of our time seriously could have called in half as many, perhaps fewer, and, if that occasionally turned out not to be sufficient, additional candidates the next day. By the end of the first day they knew that they had most of the jurors they needed, could have saved most of the rest of us the time and the trip.
Further evidence is how our time in the courthouse was used. We arrived the first day by nine, were sent home at four, a total of seven hours on site. Of those seven hours we spent most of an hour waiting to be told what room we were to go to, an hour and a half for lunch, two hour long breaks. We were actually involved in the jury selection process for less than three hours out of seven.
That again looks like a result of treating our time as a free good, but I do not know enough about what else was happening to be certain. Running a trial, even the preliminaries to a trial, involves coordinating the activity of multiple people: juror candidates, the judge, the attorneys, perhaps others. My guess is that if the county had to pay a market rate for our time they would have found a schedule that used it more efficiently but I could be wrong.
I have so far interpreted what I observed as evidence that the people responsible did not care how much of our time was spent in the process, since our attendance was compulsory and the price paid for it low, on the first day zero, but there is another possible interpretation of the evidence.
Free Audience
Much of the time we were in the courthouse we were being preached to, largely about the virtues of the jury system, first in videos while we were waiting to be assigned to a jury room, later by the judge, who described the jury system as the essential support of a free society. He did not mention that, in the current US legal system, less than a tenth of felony defendants get a jury trial,3 with the rest of the convictions due to guilty pleas, mostly from plea bargains. A defendant who rejects the offered plea bargain and goes to trial risks a much higher penalty.
The judge and the videos repeatedly told us that, if we ended up on the jury, we were to decide the case on the basis only of information presented at trial, ignoring anything else, especially warning us against going online to get relevant information. That sounds reasonable but is in fact impossible. Each juror’s interpretation of witness testimony depends on his view of how truthful people are, how to tell when they are lying, how likely the events they describe are to have happened, an enormous body of information based on previous experience. There is no way to reach a verdict on the basis of nothing but trial evidence. As a Bayesian would put it, no posterior without a prior.
The judge and the videos repeatedly praised us for our contribution to the process, never mentioning that it was mandatory, that we did not have the option of refusing to come.
We were being told things the judge, the trial apparatus more generally, wanted us to believe, told them by authoritative sources at little risk of being contradicted. Not only was time we spent in the courthouse not a cost to those running the process it may have been, from their point of view, a benefit.
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For the sort of questions asked see JURY-002 Juror Questionnaire for Criminal Cases/Capital ... .
We were supposed to be paid thirty-four cents a mile for the drive to the courthouse, so ignoring the distance was not entirely costless.
Less than two percent in California.
I have been called for jury duty twice (75 years old). The first was while in the Navy, floating around the Western Pacific on an aircraft carrier. I thought that was pretty funny. I wrote back "Sure, if you pay my airfare and arrange time off with the Navy" and never heard back from them.
The second time was maybe 20 years ago. I had been joking with a guy who claimed to be the county Libertarian Party chief, but when I told him I hadn't been called for jury duty since that Navy joke, said he had some pull. About two months later, I got called in. Some libertarian! Of course it might have been coincidence.
The experience was almost exactly as you describe. Hurry up and wait, spend all day doing nothing, fill out a questionnaire, then go home without ever having done anything other than fill out the questionnaire.
But there was one interesting thing. The prospect next to me should have been excused right from the start. She told me quite the story, and whether it was true or not, she did not belong on any jury. She said she had written all this down on her questionnaire.
She was a grandmother. Took her granddaughter for a walk in the park. Found a purse in the bushes. No cash or credit cards or IDs, but it did have the owner's name. She called when she got home, said she'd found the purse, wanted to return it, and was there a reward? She got to the owner's house and was arrested for stealing the purse, cash, and credit cards. They actually prosecuted her twice, got a hung jury both times, and were threatening to prosecute a third time.
Personally, it struck me as bizarre. If true, there must have been some additional evidence, because it's hard for me to imagine two prosecutions with the only evidence being that she tried to get a reward for returning the purse that she had claimed to have found while walking with her granddaughter. Why not ask for the reward? She was a grandmother living in a trailer park. A little extra cash would be handy. And if she made the whole thing up, then please, keep her off all juries!
Mostly it just confirmed my belief that government is incompetent, inefficient, and doesn't care.
Do you think the judge realized the irony of telling a group of coerced people who were not free to leave the jury system that such a system is the basis for a free society?