Originally published by Rita Handrich.
We like a good conspiracy theorist and last year we ran across an article on some out-of-the-mainstream-conspiracy-theories we had not heard of before. So naturally, we blogged about them. Along the same lines, although Stan Brodsky and some of his colleagues have written an article on jury duty excuses—it appears they missed a few. Although they covered hardship, and goofy excuses (like Tina Fey dressed up like Princess Leia in an effort to be excused) we just don’t think they identified demonic transference as an excuse. As a public service, let us add to their list.
A recent article in The Columbian newspaper listed some of the more creative reasons potential jurors wanted to be excused.
Demonic transference: Judge David Gregerson said he once had a juror explain that he believes in demonic transference, the act of a demonic spirit taking over a mortal body. Gregerson said he didn’t know what that meant at the time and later looked it up. (We must confess that we had no idea what that was either but the pictures you find if you search the internet for ‘demonic transference’ are pretty scary.)
A plastic baby doll: Judge Suzan Clark said her predecessor had a juror who showed up to trial with a plastic baby doll. She said the doll accompanied the man through the entire trial.
Inappropriate T-shirts: (like the one illustrating this post) have also caught Clark’s eye.
I need to meditate: Clark said when she was a defense attorney she encountered a woman who during voir dire said she couldn’t serve on a jury because she needed to meditate for 10 minutes every hour. In the end, she wasn’t selected.
You stink: Many people have said they can’t sit through trial because of the smell of the other jurors’ aftershave or body spray, Clark said. [On several occasions we have had mock jurors request reseating because the person next to them smelled awful. Upon investigation, the complaining juror was always correct.]
You can see people talking about jury duty every day on Twitter, Instagram, tumblr, and even Pinterest. Most of the entries on all of these platforms are either illustrations of their jury summons or questions about how to get out of jury duty. It’s like a cottage industry about getting out of your civic duty!
It’s intriguing to us because it just isn’t what we see and hear in our pretrial research. Most of our mock jurors who’ve been actual jurors tell us they enjoyed their stint as a juror and felt they’d done an important thing by participating. Recently, we had one woman say she’d just finished as a juror in a murder trial and had been traumatized by the photos so she wondered if we would be showing photos of dead people. We assured her we would not.
We tend to think how jurors respond to jury duty has a lot to do with whether they know how to do their job as a juror. When attorneys teach jurors how to deliberate—our guess is satisfaction with the task goes up. And it’s tough to figure out how to engage a juror who didn’t want to be part of your case and now has to attend a lengthy trial against their will. Indeed, if someone has a terrible attitude coming in, they are probably going to be distracted by their own attitude and less likely to attend to the evidence.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
from Texas Bar Today http://ift.tt/1LbaQwZ
via Abogado Aly Website
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