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breenthumb commented on a discussion: Jury Duty COVID-19 style
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breenthumb

Oh, lisa, that will be interesting. And time consuming.

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Kathsgrdn

I was sent a notice a couple times in the military but was out of state or country. I think once as a nurse got called but we were so short staffed I got out of it. The last time I had to show up, got sent home, I'm sure because I was a nurse. Guy on trial was a doctor and his nurses ratted him out some drug offence.

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Lars

<Massachusetts has a "One day, one trial" policy. So if you don't get called the first day, you've still fulfilled your obligation. Your name is put back into the mix 3 years afterwards. You can postpone your date up to 6 months after the first one assigned, but you can only change it one time. Once you turn 65, you can request to have your jury duty at the courthouse closest to your home. Once you turn 70, you can decline to serve.>

This sounds very similar to California, except that I believe that your name gets put back into the mix in two years instead of three, but I am not sure about that.

I was not aware of being able to request to have the jury duty at the courthouse closest to my house after 65, but that sounds like a reasonable idea. You can certainly decline to serve after 70 in California by simply writing a reason on the form.

What is odd is that I posted on this thread two days ago (on Saturday), but the it did not show up on the front page until today for me. So I tried to start my own thread on Sunday, and it disappeared within two or three minutes after I posted it, and I attempted three times. I had saved my message as a text file before attempting to post, and so I did not have to keep writing it. It was basically the same message that I wrote here two days ago.

I have no idea why those thread disappeared, but I blame it on the Sunday gremlins.

Our sister, who is a lawyer in Austin, Texas, told Kevin and me that we could get dragged into court for not showing up for jury duty, but if they did that for everyone in L.A. County who did not show up, the courts would be doing nothing else. I think it is slightly more difficult to get a jury when the population is very diverse - at least it seemed that way when I went for jury duty in San Francisco. A lot of people had English as their second language, and they got dismissed fairly quickly. One woman from Guatemala got dismissed because she told the judge that she could not be fair. She said, "No, I cannot be fair - I am brown," meaning that she could not have fair skin. There were a lot of characters that got called up for jury duty in San Francisco when I got called, which was around 1979, I think. We were not allowed to read books in the courtroom, but one woman had brought her knitting and got stern looks from the judge and the D.A., but it was not against the rules, and so they could not make her stop. It made me wish that I had known how to knit.

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