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.
I agree on the jury duty thing, in my six decade of life I have only been called to jury duty once, around seven or eight years ago. The case was a high profile case and over two hundred jurors were called in because, well IDK but that is standard practice I was told in my state for any trial, big or small. After twiddling our thumbs for about six hours, and I think neither the judge nor the lawyers wanted to do a two or three week jury selection, the judge went to the front of the big room we were all in and said "raise your hand if you have ever ever heard about this story via the news, friends, family, anyhow". Ten minutes later they dismissed about 80% of the people, myself included simply because we raised our hands. They could have just did that in the beginning but nope, six hours in.
As to your story, I believe it could literally be exactly that. I plead guilty, lifetime felon sex offender, after getting arrested, charged, and prosecuted for simply reporting to Crimestoppers a mugger preying on punters by badly (unreasonably so even) pretending to be a sex worker as part of the community neighborhood watch I ran after a couple sex workers reported the person to me because as lawyers like to say, "the law is what the law is, not what you want it to be" and my state explicitly in statute made it a sex offense to report a law enforcement stings involving pretend sex workers because it's "reckless to not believe them when they aren't believable". Actual sex workers require intent and action, but nope, not for stings. Could have risked a jury like your girl BUT it was $50 fine + registration vs. ten years prison no parole per the judge's own mouth and a state 100% historical conviction rate on that charge. I had kids to raise (hence why I was in a neighborhood watch).
It wouldn't surprise me in your story if the police literally planted that wallet looking to set up someone for theft. We had a case locally a while ago where it came out the police scattered used syringes in a park on the ground with actual drug residue in them and then arrested some random guy who picked them up because the residue quantity was high enough to qualify for strict liability drug possession. And he was convicted too by a jury and upheld on appeal because just like me, my state tacs on "reckless' to every statute unlike most states, i.e. "he shouldn't have picked them (medical waste/liter) up because a reasonable person in this state wouldn't have, he wasn't a parks and rec employee nor trained in safe handling of needles hence he was reckless". The guy couldn't even claim (he tried) "entrapment" because entrapment requires intent, i.e. "I really did mean to do the crime but I wouldn't had had the cops not set me up" and in this case, since it was strict liability intent didn't matter though, as the judge pointed out, even if he could beat strict liability he still couldn't claim entrapment because he wasn't claiming intent and the charge was reckless; there is no reckless entrapment defense as I found out myself too. My own lawyer said in my own case it would have been better had I actually been trying to break the law because then at least we could have argued entrapment lol. It's a great catch 22 the state set-up where if argue entrapment they pursue reckless and if you are reckless (hence admitting everything happened) then they pursue intent and the state can literally pursue both at the same time whereas you can't as the defense because the strategy for one defense precludes the other one.
As to the "why", well quotas of course, the alternative paper ran an expose a couple weeks before about municipal misuse of Federal drug funds and it embarrassed the local DA and police (who were funneling the money into other programs) and so they have to put up some quick and easy results, even if they had to manufacture them and do they did. It was an open secret to all, you want to talk about malicious prosecution lol.
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?
This sort of thing is exceedingly common. I do want to point out that government is absolutely not the only offender. Many businesses feel free to save employee (paid) time by reassigning tasks to (paying) customers. Others simply feel the best use of a any random individual's time is being told to buy that company's products, and deleting, blocking, or ignoring their advertisements.
A case in point: I'm currently ghosting a vendor with whom I had a scheduled appointment. They sold me hearing aids long ago. The price included an annual hearing test, with the hearing aids adjusted to compensate for any changes, along with free supplies and two cleanings a year.
After at least one change of ownership, they had made it impossible to call the local branch, which knew its own schedule. Appointments at the local branch were scheduled by people who didn't know the branch schedule. Calling took you to a voice mail menu that took ages to navigate and generally failed to get you to an informed human.
Advertisements were plentiful; the same phone number(s) that were used to schedule appointments were also used to make unsolicited sales calls - often by folks who didn't know I was already a customer. And when I did go in for appointments, they used the opportunity to try to sell me new "improved" hearing aids. etc. etc.
The result of business practices like this was that I fled to their competition as soon as I decided to actually get new HAs. I'd have done so even if the price at the new place was similar - but as it happened, the new HAs were significantly cheaper, and <em>probably</em> equivalent to what the first lot were trying to sell me.
But I couldn't cancel my appointment, made 6 months or more in advance (in person, because that was when I could speak with someone with access to the branch calendar). Or rather, I couldn't do it without spending possibly quite a long time navigating the voice menus designed to save them time, and not being certain the message would get to those who actually needed it.
I'd expected to be able to cancel when they called me to "confirm" the appointment. But well before that happened I finally gave up on allowing calls from unrecognized numbers to activate my phone's ringer. Humans with new phone numbers can leave messages, and even get their new number added to my whitelist. But many businesses arrange things so employees can't predict what numbers their calls will come from - nor can they be called directly at work. Your product has to be *very* important to me before I'll turn off Do Not Disturb in order to talk with you, given the number of spamvertisements arriving at my cell phone every day.
Bottom line: wasting my time is "good business" as well as "good government". And for some reason I resent it more when it comes from business than government. At a guess, you may have the opposite bias.
Ah . . . Jury Duty . . . as an engineer, the evidence suggests that my coworkers and I are Proof against Lawyers. We don't care about your appeals to emotion. That's a feature, not a bug, trust me you don't want us considering the feelings of an i-beam. None of us ever get past the day one pro forma activities, not even the presumably more empathetic women.
My youngest sister, on the other hand, is a middle school teacher. Lawyers just Love to have her on their jury, no doubt assuming a female teacher will be much more sympathetic to the poor soul unjustly oppressed by a cruel government apparatus.
Yeah, I've long felt taxpayers really need to push laws that ban government adverts period hard stop sans adverts for individual benefits / rights. That means no you don't get to run Army recruiting ads, no every construction project doesn't get to have a big board on it that says "brought to you by Councilman Beth", etc.
Yeah the worst is the blurring of the lines between communication about public life and promotion of elected people
I don't know about you but in France we have magazines edited and paid for by the city, but that are mostly about how great the current city council is
I don't know how politically practical it is, but you could set things up so the time cost got subtracted from a pool of money and what was left at the end of the year went as bonuses to some set of employees whose decisions affected the cost.
The usual way markets solve the problem of what constitutes a fair amount of quality in a product and a fair price for that product is competition. For a hammer, for example, there's no haranguing over what constitutes a "fair hammer" followed by haranguing over the price one should pay for that hammer; instead, we pit two or more hammer suppliers against each other, knowing they both have the incentive to sell hammers for the lowest quality and highest price they can get away with, and the customers have an incentive to keep the price low and the quality high. The result informs everyone of what the ideal exchange really is; if quality could be better, at least one supplier would have figured out how; if the price could be lower, at least one supplier would have found that lower cost production method.
A natural question is whether we can apply this to jury duty. View it as a service, and people could supply it professionally; the customers would be prosecutors and defense attorneys. They would shop for their preferred jurors in a manner very similar to today's voir dire.
One obvious problem with this is that there are two types of customers, they have to jointly buy the same service, and they have very different preferences: the prosecutors want jurors who will assure guilty verdicts; the defense wants jurors who will acquit. However, voir dire currently succeeds in selecting jurors under the same legal pressures, so I'm betting there are already ways to solve this problem.
Another problem I see here is that it would require dispensing with a historical tradition in the US, where a trial is considered just if and only if the jury are the peers of the defendant: people who arguably could find themselves in the defendant's position someday, and would therefore exercise appropriate leniency on the premise they will enjoy the same should that day come, paired with their natural desire for justice for any victims. I currently wonder whether Americans still see juries as fulfilling that purpose.
In the Athenian system jurors were paid, there were very large juries, and it ended up as a sort of welfare system. I think that meant that jurors were mostly poor.
To get real competition you need multiple providers of the services provided by courts. You get that with arbitration or a polylegal system, since people choose the arbitration firm/court when they write a contract. You could get it with the sort of stateless legal system I sketched in my first book: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
UK has recently restricted jury trials to serious criminal cases only. In any case, jury trials apparently exist in Anglo countries only. Even in America, only one trial in ten proceeds to jury. So, I suppose the entire jury system could be abolished without much upheaval, particularly so most immigrants arrive from countries that lack the jury culture.
English had imposed jury system in India but had to let it go because the native juries were easily bribed or were moved by extraneous considerations such as caste,
Norway recently had its last jury trial, against a corrupt police officer. It ended with the jury's verdict being invalidated by the judges, as the mix of guilty and not guilty verdicts was deemed to be logically inconsistent.
That's no excuse for what amounts to slavery. By that logic, we should pay cops, prosecutors, judges, road crews, building inspectors, and every other government employee a pittance; surely the reduction in budgets would be beneficial to society. Heck, while we're at it, they should pay a pittance for all the supplies they buy.
Trial by jury was supposed to be a privilege of free people, historically speaking. But the whole thing is quite antiquated and needs to be abolished wholesale.
If all felonies went to juries and trials were as long as they now are the cost would be very large; I have a calculation of how large in footnote 2 of https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/torture.
Jury system needs to go because we don't have a jury system as people think it works nor envisioned by our founders. If we are going to keep the jury, then we need to restore it to things like "beyond a reasonable doubt" (the rest of the world ditched that in the last century because those words don't mean what we think they mean anymore, it requires a belief in God for example. Other nations changed it to things like "are you 100% sure" because the word reasonable throws everyone off because when you are only holdout, you think to yourself maybe YOU aren't reasonable .. this is a known and serious problem), an actual jury of ones peers and by peers that means actual peers in the community that person lives in, not the "city/county/whatever", as community norms change block-to-block, online community -to- online community, etc, AND we need to, in the jury instructions, actually advise people about their RIGHT and DUTY to jury nullify as, to paraphrase the SCOTUS when they upheld it (multiple times) "the jury is not there just to judge the facts or guilt, but also the justness of the law itself and the maximum range of punishment for it. If juror disagrees on ANY of that, then they need to vote not guilty even if the person is factually guilty as sin because you are also judging the law and proper use of discretion itself".
That last one is important because in all states (New Hampshire the sole exception I believe) court and bar rules prevent lawyers from using jury nullification as a defense or even mentioning it and likewise, jury instructions are explicitly prohibited from mentioned it and, in some cases, they outright warn against it and hint at criminal prosecution for doing so but with just enough deniability it doesn't run afoul of the SCOTUS.
The problem with juries isn't the pay (that's a different problem), the problem is they all think they are on Law and Order, they have no incentive (i.e. God) to error on the side of the defendant, and fundamentally believe their job is to convict the person because "why else would they be here" and then entire system is setup to convince them "when in doubt, convict. Or hell even if in doubt but you just don't like them as a person". OJ was a fluke as are most not guilties like the Kenosha kid and the New York subway guy, not the norm which is why the prosecutors are confident in charging innocent people.
No, disagree all you want - and note I made no strong assertions, just asked questions - but “by that logic” you cannot pay other government employees or contractors a pittance, for they will not do it.
Those are full-time livelihood jobs you are talking about. The jury system is a tiny fraction of anyone’s time, except in rare cases.
I’d rather save my tax dollars for a volunteer army and “force labor” for the tiny amount of effort that is jury duty than the reverse.
And yes, I’m aware that you are against all of it.
“Taxes are theft; taxes are slavery”, yeah, yeah.
But national defense at the barest minimum, and police and courts realistically, are the price we pay to live in a civil society, and so while I have enormous problems with much of the rest of what government spends money on and how inefficiently it spends our money, I have the most sympathy for taxes for defense, courts and police.
And I will repeat that I have no moral/ethical opinion on how much we should pay jurors (and yet again, I am well aware that you do…); my question for DF was about what might make the system more efficient.
If the answer is higher pay for jurors, I’d be fine with that.
Let's see, what does that pesky 13th amendment say about slavery ... ah yes ... "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Well if you want to stick with the current system but make it just, then you just pay them their market wage as David suggested included travel expenses, it's not hard, HR departments everywhere do it. You simply have them submit their last pay stub (or equivalent) so you can figure out their hourly rate (even if salary) plus any travel and food (lunch) receipts and IRS milage rates. For niche cases outside that you have a individualized process to determine some rate on the high end (Elon Musk for example) and a floor (minimum wage) on the low end (homeless for example). It takes a HR person all of five minutes to process each one, so an hour or two of her time per jury pool.
But really we just need to toss the jury system completely, it's uncommon throughout the world and even England is getting rid of (story recently on BBC) for all but capital offenses like murder. TBH the entire common law system needs to go and especially in the US who refuses, unlike the other few vestibule common law countries, to modernize it past the 19th century. Our system is a joke, and known as so for at least a century, it's time for it to go.
I used to have mixed feelings about common law and civil codes, without understanding them in much detail. The idea that judges "discover" law struck me as ludicrous, but so did the idea that legislators can anticipate every crime which needs a law; judges are going to judge "new" crimes based on existing law in both systems, with the only real difference that I know of being that the common law interpolation is entered into the books as a new law, but forgotten in civil codes unless the judge forwards it to legislatures to create new legislation. In that regard, the common law seems more reasonable since it leaves it open to appeals courts to compare all the newly discovered laws and adjust them into the whole corpus more or less, rather than rely on legislators dealing with only the forwarded new verdicts.
Bruno Leoni wrote a book, "Freedom and the Law", which compares common law to free markets and civil codes to central planning, one of those insights which are immediately obvious once read.
My biggest gripe with common law is the idea of precedent. I would much rather every case was judged from first principles: the Constitution and the law itself, ignoring all past interpretations and all past verdicts. Civil code sort of claims to do that, as I understand it, but throws away all that discovered law. Yes, there's a conflict between liking that and detesting precedent, but precedent seems to me different, and I know I'd have a hard time explaining the difference to a lawyer.
Compared to my experience with jury duty in Tampa, Florida a few years back, it seems California respects the time of its citizens a very good deal indeed!
I remember 100+ of us being held in various rooms at the courthouse all day, and not a single one of us was even called back to see the judge. Someone on the courthouse staff had us all swear that we were eligible to be jurors and were not in fact Governor Rick Scott, and that was about it.
Isn't a $15 per day payment for jury duty considered a "taking" that violates the constitution? Its less than minimum wage, and certainly less than everyone's time is worth. If only we abolished sovereign immunity so these things could be more easily tested in court.
Oh, that sense of "free labor." I must confess I thought of it as opposed to "slave labor." Ironically, I would have to count jury duty as slave labor, in that one is not free to refuse to take the job.
I doubt I'll ever be called again, but I've always wondered how I would handle jury nullification in a trial where I thought the law was immoral. I'm a terrible liar even in the poker sense, and if they asked directly what I knew about jury nullification, I would not try denying all knowledge. I like to think I would say something obnoxious like "Oh, that duty of jurors to acquit if the law is unjust? Yeah, I heard of that." If they didn't ask and I was chosen, I like to think I'd just refuse to vote guilty, say the cop sounded like he was reciting a script from memory, or the whole setup sounded fishy, something didn't smell right. I'm sure I could keep that up long enough.
In theory, jury duty is mandatory, but based on my conversations with people, it is in fact quite optional. Many of those in the jury pool when I went were treating it like an extra vacation day that their workplace couldn’t refuse. Many I talk to outside it just throw away the notices, and nothing seems to ever come of that, presumably because so many people quietly refuse, and there are still enough jury pool members who do not (locally).
Depends on the state. I know for a fact in my district court, they issue a bench warrant for any juror that doesn't show, i.e. at the beginning of jury duty, they spend an hour or two doing rollcall and the judge on the spot issues bench warrants real time for anyone who doesn't respond "here". They cut a little leeway if you are late (well unless your last name starts with Z) but once the book is closed, you will have bench warrant until you can get before that judge, at least until the next day. I don't think any cops actually go track anyone down, like most bench warrants, but if you get a speeding ticket on the way home, you will be spending the night in jail.
I wonder, is the potential bias of people from one part of the county vs. another simply a reflection of different levels of e.g. income, different political affiliations ,etc.? I know often these things are tracked by zip code…
I did Jury Duty once in New Zealand as a young student. I think I was paid about $200 for the week, even though I didn't actually get selected on a jury in the end. I leapt at the opportunity, as I was selected for Jury Duty during the summer break and I didn't have a job yet.
While I enjoyed the jury training, I was actually really glad I didn't end up on the jury, as the case involved low level cannabis possession charges and I felt the law around possession as it stood at the time was morally wrong. Had I served, I likely would have ended up having to vote against my conscience if the evidence had conclusively demonstrated that he did in fact commit the crime.
I figured I would have been outvoted 11 to 1. Most of the other members of the jury pool didn't like the look of the accused, thought he had a 'shady vibe'.
There's always jury nullification. It's my understand that back 200 years ago, that was considered one of the primary reasons for juries -- to acquit when the law or specific charges were government overreach.
40 years ago, at least one law professor was still teaching that having the human element of juries and/or judges involved was a relief mechanism for when the law as written doesn't do justice with certain sets of facts.
That ship sailed in practice, the US judiciary and bar is outright hostile to it. The only reason it isn't illegal is the SCOTUS said it's a right so they (the states) do the next best thing, they just bury it and make it unethical and loss of license (debarred) for lawyers to even discuss it with their clients or in court while likewise strongly advising against it in jury instructions to the point of hinting it's illegal (though it's not but because it's a hint, it's legitimate). Generally that comes up during the questionnaire and anybody who even knows what it is is immediately eliminated by the judge, not even the lawyers and people have been prosecuted for perjury for trying to get around it only to be found later they have seen a FIJA flyer outside the court house.
It's a legal fiction we tell ourselves so we can justify the injustice of modern juries.
The justice system is ceremonial. The problems are real, but forgetting them is easy and solving them is hard. Forgetting them is so easy, in fact, that you can afford to create new ones because you have so much excess capacity. Most institutions and common practices are attempts to call down divinity into something empty, something people think is pretty enough that a God would see fit to imbue it with function. And these things are pretty. But there is no God to imbue them with function, and I am getting tired.
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.
I agree on the jury duty thing, in my six decade of life I have only been called to jury duty once, around seven or eight years ago. The case was a high profile case and over two hundred jurors were called in because, well IDK but that is standard practice I was told in my state for any trial, big or small. After twiddling our thumbs for about six hours, and I think neither the judge nor the lawyers wanted to do a two or three week jury selection, the judge went to the front of the big room we were all in and said "raise your hand if you have ever ever heard about this story via the news, friends, family, anyhow". Ten minutes later they dismissed about 80% of the people, myself included simply because we raised our hands. They could have just did that in the beginning but nope, six hours in.
As to your story, I believe it could literally be exactly that. I plead guilty, lifetime felon sex offender, after getting arrested, charged, and prosecuted for simply reporting to Crimestoppers a mugger preying on punters by badly (unreasonably so even) pretending to be a sex worker as part of the community neighborhood watch I ran after a couple sex workers reported the person to me because as lawyers like to say, "the law is what the law is, not what you want it to be" and my state explicitly in statute made it a sex offense to report a law enforcement stings involving pretend sex workers because it's "reckless to not believe them when they aren't believable". Actual sex workers require intent and action, but nope, not for stings. Could have risked a jury like your girl BUT it was $50 fine + registration vs. ten years prison no parole per the judge's own mouth and a state 100% historical conviction rate on that charge. I had kids to raise (hence why I was in a neighborhood watch).
It wouldn't surprise me in your story if the police literally planted that wallet looking to set up someone for theft. We had a case locally a while ago where it came out the police scattered used syringes in a park on the ground with actual drug residue in them and then arrested some random guy who picked them up because the residue quantity was high enough to qualify for strict liability drug possession. And he was convicted too by a jury and upheld on appeal because just like me, my state tacs on "reckless' to every statute unlike most states, i.e. "he shouldn't have picked them (medical waste/liter) up because a reasonable person in this state wouldn't have, he wasn't a parks and rec employee nor trained in safe handling of needles hence he was reckless". The guy couldn't even claim (he tried) "entrapment" because entrapment requires intent, i.e. "I really did mean to do the crime but I wouldn't had had the cops not set me up" and in this case, since it was strict liability intent didn't matter though, as the judge pointed out, even if he could beat strict liability he still couldn't claim entrapment because he wasn't claiming intent and the charge was reckless; there is no reckless entrapment defense as I found out myself too. My own lawyer said in my own case it would have been better had I actually been trying to break the law because then at least we could have argued entrapment lol. It's a great catch 22 the state set-up where if argue entrapment they pursue reckless and if you are reckless (hence admitting everything happened) then they pursue intent and the state can literally pursue both at the same time whereas you can't as the defense because the strategy for one defense precludes the other one.
As to the "why", well quotas of course, the alternative paper ran an expose a couple weeks before about municipal misuse of Federal drug funds and it embarrassed the local DA and police (who were funneling the money into other programs) and so they have to put up some quick and easy results, even if they had to manufacture them and do they did. It was an open secret to all, you want to talk about malicious prosecution lol.
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?
My guess is he did not. Also that many of the people took jury service for granted so did not feel coerced.
That the people called for jury feel they are coerced itself implies that the society isn't free any more.
I bet he didn't.
It's always jarring when the reality of our justice system bumps up against its noble ideals.
This sort of thing is exceedingly common. I do want to point out that government is absolutely not the only offender. Many businesses feel free to save employee (paid) time by reassigning tasks to (paying) customers. Others simply feel the best use of a any random individual's time is being told to buy that company's products, and deleting, blocking, or ignoring their advertisements.
A case in point: I'm currently ghosting a vendor with whom I had a scheduled appointment. They sold me hearing aids long ago. The price included an annual hearing test, with the hearing aids adjusted to compensate for any changes, along with free supplies and two cleanings a year.
After at least one change of ownership, they had made it impossible to call the local branch, which knew its own schedule. Appointments at the local branch were scheduled by people who didn't know the branch schedule. Calling took you to a voice mail menu that took ages to navigate and generally failed to get you to an informed human.
Advertisements were plentiful; the same phone number(s) that were used to schedule appointments were also used to make unsolicited sales calls - often by folks who didn't know I was already a customer. And when I did go in for appointments, they used the opportunity to try to sell me new "improved" hearing aids. etc. etc.
The result of business practices like this was that I fled to their competition as soon as I decided to actually get new HAs. I'd have done so even if the price at the new place was similar - but as it happened, the new HAs were significantly cheaper, and <em>probably</em> equivalent to what the first lot were trying to sell me.
But I couldn't cancel my appointment, made 6 months or more in advance (in person, because that was when I could speak with someone with access to the branch calendar). Or rather, I couldn't do it without spending possibly quite a long time navigating the voice menus designed to save them time, and not being certain the message would get to those who actually needed it.
I'd expected to be able to cancel when they called me to "confirm" the appointment. But well before that happened I finally gave up on allowing calls from unrecognized numbers to activate my phone's ringer. Humans with new phone numbers can leave messages, and even get their new number added to my whitelist. But many businesses arrange things so employees can't predict what numbers their calls will come from - nor can they be called directly at work. Your product has to be *very* important to me before I'll turn off Do Not Disturb in order to talk with you, given the number of spamvertisements arriving at my cell phone every day.
Bottom line: wasting my time is "good business" as well as "good government". And for some reason I resent it more when it comes from business than government. At a guess, you may have the opposite bias.
You could switch suppliers. It is more difficult to switch governments.
Isn't that what elections are for?
Ah . . . Jury Duty . . . as an engineer, the evidence suggests that my coworkers and I are Proof against Lawyers. We don't care about your appeals to emotion. That's a feature, not a bug, trust me you don't want us considering the feelings of an i-beam. None of us ever get past the day one pro forma activities, not even the presumably more empathetic women.
My youngest sister, on the other hand, is a middle school teacher. Lawyers just Love to have her on their jury, no doubt assuming a female teacher will be much more sympathetic to the poor soul unjustly oppressed by a cruel government apparatus.
On this point, they are Dreadfully mistaken.
The prosecutor gets to challenge jurors too, so I would expect the most likely to be chosen are those whose bias cannot be predicted.
I winder why these kinds of institutions feel the need to propagandize in this way
I recently went to a local police station and in the waiting room was a TV looping through ads about how great the police was
Yeah, I've long felt taxpayers really need to push laws that ban government adverts period hard stop sans adverts for individual benefits / rights. That means no you don't get to run Army recruiting ads, no every construction project doesn't get to have a big board on it that says "brought to you by Councilman Beth", etc.
Agreed!
Yeah the worst is the blurring of the lines between communication about public life and promotion of elected people
I don't know about you but in France we have magazines edited and paid for by the city, but that are mostly about how great the current city council is
Yeah we have those in my locality as well.
A serious question: how practically could one make the system better?
You can say pay jurors more, but with all taxpayers bearing the expense, that’s surely unclear to be beneficial to society.
How would one go about changing the incentives to make it better? In the real world.
I don't know how politically practical it is, but you could set things up so the time cost got subtracted from a pool of money and what was left at the end of the year went as bonuses to some set of employees whose decisions affected the cost.
The usual way markets solve the problem of what constitutes a fair amount of quality in a product and a fair price for that product is competition. For a hammer, for example, there's no haranguing over what constitutes a "fair hammer" followed by haranguing over the price one should pay for that hammer; instead, we pit two or more hammer suppliers against each other, knowing they both have the incentive to sell hammers for the lowest quality and highest price they can get away with, and the customers have an incentive to keep the price low and the quality high. The result informs everyone of what the ideal exchange really is; if quality could be better, at least one supplier would have figured out how; if the price could be lower, at least one supplier would have found that lower cost production method.
A natural question is whether we can apply this to jury duty. View it as a service, and people could supply it professionally; the customers would be prosecutors and defense attorneys. They would shop for their preferred jurors in a manner very similar to today's voir dire.
One obvious problem with this is that there are two types of customers, they have to jointly buy the same service, and they have very different preferences: the prosecutors want jurors who will assure guilty verdicts; the defense wants jurors who will acquit. However, voir dire currently succeeds in selecting jurors under the same legal pressures, so I'm betting there are already ways to solve this problem.
Another problem I see here is that it would require dispensing with a historical tradition in the US, where a trial is considered just if and only if the jury are the peers of the defendant: people who arguably could find themselves in the defendant's position someday, and would therefore exercise appropriate leniency on the premise they will enjoy the same should that day come, paired with their natural desire for justice for any victims. I currently wonder whether Americans still see juries as fulfilling that purpose.
Two points:
In the Athenian system jurors were paid, there were very large juries, and it ended up as a sort of welfare system. I think that meant that jurors were mostly poor.
To get real competition you need multiple providers of the services provided by courts. You get that with arbitration or a polylegal system, since people choose the arbitration firm/court when they write a contract. You could get it with the sort of stateless legal system I sketched in my first book: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
That was precisely one of the systems I was thinking about when I wrote!
...I wonder, in fact, if anyone else out there has sketched an alternate system...
UK has recently restricted jury trials to serious criminal cases only. In any case, jury trials apparently exist in Anglo countries only. Even in America, only one trial in ten proceeds to jury. So, I suppose the entire jury system could be abolished without much upheaval, particularly so most immigrants arrive from countries that lack the jury culture.
English had imposed jury system in India but had to let it go because the native juries were easily bribed or were moved by extraneous considerations such as caste,
Norway recently had its last jury trial, against a corrupt police officer. It ended with the jury's verdict being invalidated by the judges, as the mix of guilty and not guilty verdicts was deemed to be logically inconsistent.
That's no excuse for what amounts to slavery. By that logic, we should pay cops, prosecutors, judges, road crews, building inspectors, and every other government employee a pittance; surely the reduction in budgets would be beneficial to society. Heck, while we're at it, they should pay a pittance for all the supplies they buy.
Trial by jury was supposed to be a privilege of free people, historically speaking. But the whole thing is quite antiquated and needs to be abolished wholesale.
Nuts. Juries are vital. The fact that governments find them inconvenient is the best argument for keeping them.
Here I am reading that citizens find them inconvenient too.
The government finds them inconvenient for thwarting government prosecutors and judges.
People find them inconvenient for the forced labor and low pay.
World of difference.
If all felonies went to juries and trials were as long as they now are the cost would be very large; I have a calculation of how large in footnote 2 of https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/torture.
I discuss some of the options in https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/prosecutorial-discretion.
FWIW, I would indeed abolish the jury system for civil cases. But not for criminal ones.
Jury system needs to go because we don't have a jury system as people think it works nor envisioned by our founders. If we are going to keep the jury, then we need to restore it to things like "beyond a reasonable doubt" (the rest of the world ditched that in the last century because those words don't mean what we think they mean anymore, it requires a belief in God for example. Other nations changed it to things like "are you 100% sure" because the word reasonable throws everyone off because when you are only holdout, you think to yourself maybe YOU aren't reasonable .. this is a known and serious problem), an actual jury of ones peers and by peers that means actual peers in the community that person lives in, not the "city/county/whatever", as community norms change block-to-block, online community -to- online community, etc, AND we need to, in the jury instructions, actually advise people about their RIGHT and DUTY to jury nullify as, to paraphrase the SCOTUS when they upheld it (multiple times) "the jury is not there just to judge the facts or guilt, but also the justness of the law itself and the maximum range of punishment for it. If juror disagrees on ANY of that, then they need to vote not guilty even if the person is factually guilty as sin because you are also judging the law and proper use of discretion itself".
That last one is important because in all states (New Hampshire the sole exception I believe) court and bar rules prevent lawyers from using jury nullification as a defense or even mentioning it and likewise, jury instructions are explicitly prohibited from mentioned it and, in some cases, they outright warn against it and hint at criminal prosecution for doing so but with just enough deniability it doesn't run afoul of the SCOTUS.
The problem with juries isn't the pay (that's a different problem), the problem is they all think they are on Law and Order, they have no incentive (i.e. God) to error on the side of the defendant, and fundamentally believe their job is to convict the person because "why else would they be here" and then entire system is setup to convince them "when in doubt, convict. Or hell even if in doubt but you just don't like them as a person". OJ was a fluke as are most not guilties like the Kenosha kid and the New York subway guy, not the norm which is why the prosecutors are confident in charging innocent people.
No, disagree all you want - and note I made no strong assertions, just asked questions - but “by that logic” you cannot pay other government employees or contractors a pittance, for they will not do it.
Those are full-time livelihood jobs you are talking about. The jury system is a tiny fraction of anyone’s time, except in rare cases.
If they are that tiny a fraction, then the extra expense is negligible and your excuse vanishes in the rounding errors. Forced labor is slavery.
You do you.
I’d rather save my tax dollars for a volunteer army and “force labor” for the tiny amount of effort that is jury duty than the reverse.
And yes, I’m aware that you are against all of it.
“Taxes are theft; taxes are slavery”, yeah, yeah.
But national defense at the barest minimum, and police and courts realistically, are the price we pay to live in a civil society, and so while I have enormous problems with much of the rest of what government spends money on and how inefficiently it spends our money, I have the most sympathy for taxes for defense, courts and police.
And I will repeat that I have no moral/ethical opinion on how much we should pay jurors (and yet again, I am well aware that you do…); my question for DF was about what might make the system more efficient.
If the answer is higher pay for jurors, I’d be fine with that.
Let's see, what does that pesky 13th amendment say about slavery ... ah yes ... "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Of what crimes have jurors been duly convicted?
No, bud, you dodged two questions.
You say "The jury system is a tiny fraction of anyone’s time, except in rare cases."
You say "You can say pay jurors more, but with all taxpayers bearing the expense, that’s surely unclear to be beneficial to society."
Which is it? A noticeable fiscal impact or a tiny fraction of expenses?
Then there's the question of forced labor at below the minimum wage. No comment? Fine with you? Government above the law?
Well if you want to stick with the current system but make it just, then you just pay them their market wage as David suggested included travel expenses, it's not hard, HR departments everywhere do it. You simply have them submit their last pay stub (or equivalent) so you can figure out their hourly rate (even if salary) plus any travel and food (lunch) receipts and IRS milage rates. For niche cases outside that you have a individualized process to determine some rate on the high end (Elon Musk for example) and a floor (minimum wage) on the low end (homeless for example). It takes a HR person all of five minutes to process each one, so an hour or two of her time per jury pool.
But really we just need to toss the jury system completely, it's uncommon throughout the world and even England is getting rid of (story recently on BBC) for all but capital offenses like murder. TBH the entire common law system needs to go and especially in the US who refuses, unlike the other few vestibule common law countries, to modernize it past the 19th century. Our system is a joke, and known as so for at least a century, it's time for it to go.
How would you determine whether the common law system was better or worse than alternatives. You are confident it is worse, but on what basis?
I used to have mixed feelings about common law and civil codes, without understanding them in much detail. The idea that judges "discover" law struck me as ludicrous, but so did the idea that legislators can anticipate every crime which needs a law; judges are going to judge "new" crimes based on existing law in both systems, with the only real difference that I know of being that the common law interpolation is entered into the books as a new law, but forgotten in civil codes unless the judge forwards it to legislatures to create new legislation. In that regard, the common law seems more reasonable since it leaves it open to appeals courts to compare all the newly discovered laws and adjust them into the whole corpus more or less, rather than rely on legislators dealing with only the forwarded new verdicts.
Bruno Leoni wrote a book, "Freedom and the Law", which compares common law to free markets and civil codes to central planning, one of those insights which are immediately obvious once read.
My biggest gripe with common law is the idea of precedent. I would much rather every case was judged from first principles: the Constitution and the law itself, ignoring all past interpretations and all past verdicts. Civil code sort of claims to do that, as I understand it, but throws away all that discovered law. Yes, there's a conflict between liking that and detesting precedent, but precedent seems to me different, and I know I'd have a hard time explaining the difference to a lawyer.
Compared to my experience with jury duty in Tampa, Florida a few years back, it seems California respects the time of its citizens a very good deal indeed!
I remember 100+ of us being held in various rooms at the courthouse all day, and not a single one of us was even called back to see the judge. Someone on the courthouse staff had us all swear that we were eligible to be jurors and were not in fact Governor Rick Scott, and that was about it.
Isn't a $15 per day payment for jury duty considered a "taking" that violates the constitution? Its less than minimum wage, and certainly less than everyone's time is worth. If only we abolished sovereign immunity so these things could be more easily tested in court.
Oh, that sense of "free labor." I must confess I thought of it as opposed to "slave labor." Ironically, I would have to count jury duty as slave labor, in that one is not free to refuse to take the job.
I have been called for jury duty twice. Both times I was dismissed as soon as I told them I was familiar with the idea of jury nullification.
I doubt I'll ever be called again, but I've always wondered how I would handle jury nullification in a trial where I thought the law was immoral. I'm a terrible liar even in the poker sense, and if they asked directly what I knew about jury nullification, I would not try denying all knowledge. I like to think I would say something obnoxious like "Oh, that duty of jurors to acquit if the law is unjust? Yeah, I heard of that." If they didn't ask and I was chosen, I like to think I'd just refuse to vote guilty, say the cop sounded like he was reciting a script from memory, or the whole setup sounded fishy, something didn't smell right. I'm sure I could keep that up long enough.
In Massachusetts, one gets to opt out of jury duty at 70. I've idly wondered if that's going to go up as lifespans increase.
In theory, jury duty is mandatory, but based on my conversations with people, it is in fact quite optional. Many of those in the jury pool when I went were treating it like an extra vacation day that their workplace couldn’t refuse. Many I talk to outside it just throw away the notices, and nothing seems to ever come of that, presumably because so many people quietly refuse, and there are still enough jury pool members who do not (locally).
Depends on the state. I know for a fact in my district court, they issue a bench warrant for any juror that doesn't show, i.e. at the beginning of jury duty, they spend an hour or two doing rollcall and the judge on the spot issues bench warrants real time for anyone who doesn't respond "here". They cut a little leeway if you are late (well unless your last name starts with Z) but once the book is closed, you will have bench warrant until you can get before that judge, at least until the next day. I don't think any cops actually go track anyone down, like most bench warrants, but if you get a speeding ticket on the way home, you will be spending the night in jail.
I wonder, is the potential bias of people from one part of the county vs. another simply a reflection of different levels of e.g. income, different political affiliations ,etc.? I know often these things are tracked by zip code…
I did Jury Duty once in New Zealand as a young student. I think I was paid about $200 for the week, even though I didn't actually get selected on a jury in the end. I leapt at the opportunity, as I was selected for Jury Duty during the summer break and I didn't have a job yet.
While I enjoyed the jury training, I was actually really glad I didn't end up on the jury, as the case involved low level cannabis possession charges and I felt the law around possession as it stood at the time was morally wrong. Had I served, I likely would have ended up having to vote against my conscience if the evidence had conclusively demonstrated that he did in fact commit the crime.
Why would you not have voted to acquit?
I figured I would have been outvoted 11 to 1. Most of the other members of the jury pool didn't like the look of the accused, thought he had a 'shady vibe'.
That would result in a hung jury.
Good point! I realised that a few years later, but at the time I was a bit naive about what a single juror could do in the New Zealand context.
There's always jury nullification. It's my understand that back 200 years ago, that was considered one of the primary reasons for juries -- to acquit when the law or specific charges were government overreach.
40 years ago, at least one law professor was still teaching that having the human element of juries and/or judges involved was a relief mechanism for when the law as written doesn't do justice with certain sets of facts.
That ship sailed in practice, the US judiciary and bar is outright hostile to it. The only reason it isn't illegal is the SCOTUS said it's a right so they (the states) do the next best thing, they just bury it and make it unethical and loss of license (debarred) for lawyers to even discuss it with their clients or in court while likewise strongly advising against it in jury instructions to the point of hinting it's illegal (though it's not but because it's a hint, it's legitimate). Generally that comes up during the questionnaire and anybody who even knows what it is is immediately eliminated by the judge, not even the lawyers and people have been prosecuted for perjury for trying to get around it only to be found later they have seen a FIJA flyer outside the court house.
It's a legal fiction we tell ourselves so we can justify the injustice of modern juries.
I call it ritual over justice.
Chesterton wrote about this in his essay Twelve Men:
https://www.chesterton.org/twelve-men/
The justice system is ceremonial. The problems are real, but forgetting them is easy and solving them is hard. Forgetting them is so easy, in fact, that you can afford to create new ones because you have so much excess capacity. Most institutions and common practices are attempts to call down divinity into something empty, something people think is pretty enough that a God would see fit to imbue it with function. And these things are pretty. But there is no God to imbue them with function, and I am getting tired.