This month, I’ve been on call for jury duty. Here in Bonner County, that means you have to call into a phone number every week for a month to find out if your group has been selected to head down to the courthouse. If your panel is up for a trial, you have to get yourself down to the courthouse or you get in big trouble.
After you’re all seated and have watched the video, about half are selected by lottery to be jurors. From that group, the lawyers ask questions and select the final 14 people who will make up the jury (12 jurors and 2 alternates). In the end, your odds of actually being selected to be on the jury seemed to be about 25%.
I never had jury duty when I lived in “the big city,” and I have to say that here the process is organized and seems to run pretty smoothly. The prospective jurors also coped remarkably well with the idea that they’d have to basically drop everything for the next five days if they were selected. (I was up for an unusually long trial; apparently, most trials are only a day or two long.)
Anyway, one thing I have always wondered about turns out to be true. In a small town, it’s somewhat difficult to find a group of 12 or 14 people that don’t know anyone involved in a given trial. In our little crowd of juror candidates, there were several neighbors of the lawyers, and a few people had kids that went to school with relatives involved in the trial, and so forth.
I suppose that’s one disadvantage for all the new people moving into town. If you’ve lived here for a while, your odds of getting selected for jury duty are probably a whole lot lower than the newbies who recently bought houses in all those new subdivisions.