I posted yesterday in Homeschool Wednesday about my first time at jury duty. Here is a quick follow up. It turns out I wasn’t chosen for either of the two trials that were under consideration and surprisingly wasn’t asked to come back today. So the only comments and observations I have are about the selection process itself.
There is lots of room to use technology to improve this process. In particular, when you are first selected, you should then fill out a juror questionnaire online that includes questions about events that you might not be able to move for the time period under consideration. That would make it much easier to review those reasons upfront (some are clearly more legitimate than others) and to better match between potential jurors’ availability and the expected length of trials.
For instance, I could have easily participated in a one week trial now but not a one month or longer trial. At some other time I might be able to do a longer trial. This could have been determined prior to my showing up yesterday. Instead pretty much all of the day was filled with moving between buildings and/or rooms, only to determine then that I and many others were not available at this particular point for a lengthy trial. If that had been known upfront the time could have been spent on actual jury selection.
This inefficiency in turn makes me wonder whether trials really need to last more than one month under any circumstance. Would love to hear about that from any lawyers reading this or people who have been on longer jury trials (apparently the longest jury trial in US history lasted 13 months).
