Jury Duty

In 22 years of being qualified, I am facing my first jury duty summons as a regular employee and see no way out except to report. The old self-employment, financial burden exemption no longer applies.

Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse myself (I live in AZ), or if I do
decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my conscious, aka jury nullification?

The other option is to just lie, it says the penalty is that of perjury and it seems we shall
soon have case law that perjury is no longer a crime.

Not a facetious post, I have seen posts here on this before, but never really paid attention because it didn't affect me. 

If no answers, I will resort to a search engine. But I thought this letter would get me better
quality advice.

Thanks

If you want to vote your conscience (if it's a drug prosecution and you
don't agree with drug laws for instance), there are a few organizations
that you might want to look at. Maybe check out http://www.cato.org/ which
last I checked had an advertisement for a new book on jury nullification
etc. on their home page.

-Declan


At 08:30 AM 12-23-98 +0100, Anonymous wrote:
>In 22 years of being qualified, I am facing my first jury duty summons as
a regular employee and see no way out except to report. The old
self-employment, financial burden exemption no longer applies.
>
>Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse
myself (I live in AZ), or if I do
>decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my
conscious, aka jury nullification?
>
>The other option is to just lie, it says the penalty is that of perjury
and it seems we shall
>soon have case law that perjury is no longer a crime.
>
>Not a facetious post, I have seen posts here on this before, but never
really paid attention because it didn't affect me. 
>
>If no answers, I will resort to a search engine. But I thought this letter
would get me better
>quality advice.
>
>Thanks
>

Also, the civilliberty.miningco.com website has a collection of jury
nullification resources.


- b!X (Guerrilla Techno-fetishist)
      (Global Effort to Eradicate Know-nothings)
      (We all suck, and that makes us strong.)

At 7:45 AM -0800 12/23/98, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>If you want to vote your conscience (if it's a drug prosecution and you
>don't agree with drug laws for instance), there are a few organizations
>that you might want to look at. Maybe check out http://www.cato.org/ which
>last I checked had an advertisement for a new book on jury nullification
>etc. on their home page.

Simply vote "not guilty" on the charges (any or all) that one thinks are
bad charges.

Jurors are not required to "explain" their votes to anyone, least of all
the government.

Though, as with speaking to cops, it may be that the more one talks in the
jury room, or attempts to explain to the judge, the worse a hole one digs
for oneself. In particular, I'd steer clear of reading books about jury
nullification, lest one be tempted to cite case law...and thus open the
door for the judge to inquire further.

Simply voting "not guilty" gives them no grounds for contempt charges, or
whatever they usually throw at jury nullification advocates.

--Tim May

We would go to their homes, and we'd kill their wives and
their children. We would kill their families
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.

On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, Anonymous wrote:

> Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse myself (I live in AZ), or if I do
> decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my conscious, aka jury nullification?

If you really do want to avoid jury service, mentioning FIJA or jury
nullification ought to do the trick - it may get every juror within
earshot excused, too, depending on how paranoid the locals are. 

But I think that's a horrible idea - jury participation is an opportunity
to exercise much more influence than you wield if/when you vote in an
election. All by yourself, voting your conscience as shaped by the
evidence and the jury instructions, you can force a mistrial, which might
or might not mean the end of the case. If your view of the evidence and
your understanding of the law, as explained by the judge in the jury
instructions, proves to be persuasive to your fellow jurors, you will
collectively make the law as it applies to the parties in your trial. It's
pretty difficult to overturn a jury verdict - not impossible, but it's
harder than you might think from watching TV.

Jury duty is, correctly understood, yet another of the "checks and
balances" of the US legal system - if the legislators and judges are doing
things with the law that the citizens don't like, don't support, or even
just don't understand, it's an opportunity for those citizens to
peacefully change the situation. Unfortunately, the jury duty process
tends to select against people with the backbone to think for themselves;
and people with backbone and strong principles often self-select away from
jury service, because the bureacratic mechansims which surround it are
confusing, annonying, and sometimes humiliating. If you can look
beyond/around that, it's an opportunity to participate in the distributed
creation of law and justice, which is a pretty big deal.

Cypherpunks serve on juries?

--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles@netbox.com

At 2:30 AM -0500 12/23/98, Anonymous wrote:
>In 22 years of being qualified, I am facing my first jury duty summons as
>a regular employee and see no way out except to report. The old
>self-employment, financial burden exemption no longer applies.
>
>Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse
>myself (I live in AZ), or if I do
>decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my
>conscious, aka jury nullification?
>
>The other option is to just lie, it says the penalty is that of perjury
>and it seems we shall
>soon have case law that perjury is no longer a crime.
>
>Not a facetious post, I have seen posts here on this before, but never
>really paid attention because it didn't affect me.

	Don't bother, take a book (say Crime & Punishment, or John Lott's
"More Guns, Less Crime, anything hard bound should do). State your opnions
on capital punishment, and on "victimless crime" & drug crimes. Mention
Jury Nullification, and you should be back on the street in an hour.

	Or, you can do your civic duty, get on the jury and do your best to
do what is right.

	I'd suggest the latter.
--
"To sum up: The entire structure of antitrust statutes in this country is a
jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance. It is a product: (a) of a
gross misinterpretation of history, and (b) of rather nave, and certainly
unrealistic, economic theories." Alan Greenspan, "Anti-trust"
http://www.ecosystems.net/mgering/antitrust.html

Petro::E-Commerce Adminstrator::Playboy Ent. Inc.::petro@playboy.com

At 08:30 AM 12/23/98 +0100, Some Anonymous Replay User wrote:
>In 22 years of being qualified, I am facing my first jury duty summons as a 
>regular employee and see no way out except to report. 
>The old self-employment, financial burden exemption no longer applies.
>
>Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse myself
>(I live in AZ), or if I do decide to report and get on a trial, 
>a web site on my rights to vote my conscious, aka jury nullification?

The Fully Informed Jury Association web page is http://www.fija.org/fija .
They've been the primary organization promoting Jury Nullification issues
for the last N years, and there's some good material there.

The question I'd ask is why you _want_ to get off jury duty.
Just to avoid wasting your time?  Don't like courts or the current laws?
Don't like having to judge other people?  Generally cantakerous? :-)  

If the problem is wasting your time, how much time gets wasted
depends a lot on your county.  Most counties call far more people
than they need to be potential jurors, just in case they need them,
and take different approaches for winnowing down to the numbers
they actually need for real cases.  The place I live now makes you
call a recorded message every night to see if your number's come up.
On the other hand, a county I used to live in made you show up
in person for the first four days whether you were needed or not,
and this was before laptop computers so I couldn't do much work there.
Another county I lived near makes the lawyers all show up Monday,
and takes care of all the jury selection that day.

On the other hand, if you are picked, and the trial is expected
to take a long time, the voir dire process generally includes
asking if this is going to cause a major hardship,
which is why juries on those cases are usually made up of
retired schoolteachers, retired military, and postal workers.
But most county jury trials seem to be civil cases, like car accidents
and such, which are usually pretty quick.

For criminal cases, the job of the jury has always been to judge
the law and its applicability as well as the facts of the case,
regardless of what the judge and prosecutor tell you
(though the judge's instructions on the law usually are
relatively good advice.)  If you think the law's bad,
like drug laws, or being applied unfairly in the case at hand,
or that the penalties are way out of line for the crime,
you can vote not guilty, and you can try to convince your
fellow jurors to do the same.  Your duty is to vote your conscience.

Alternatively, if you really want to get out of jury duty anyway,
handing out FIJA literature in the jury pool waiting room
and discussing the issues with your fellow potential jurors
should either get you thrown out quickly, because they don't
want your subversive kind around, and similarly,
if you get as far as the jury selection process,
being an intelligent and opinionated type often makes
you an undesirable juror in either civil or criminal cases,
so they may still reject you.  

But if you're the political activist type, rather than just 
trying to get out of jury duty, you can get stuck on some 
automobile accident or dog bite lawsuit 
where there's basically no FIJA issue at all and you're just
deciding who's 65% at fault and how much pain and suffering
their whiplash really caused :-)


				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639