Jury Pay

Due to the recession, people are requesting an excuse for jury duty for extreme financial hard ship. That's because the fee is often ten or twenty-two dollars a day and if the person is self-employed, they cannot afford to lose a days work.

The ancient Athenians paid common citizens the equivalent of half a days wages for an ordinary laborer. They had to use rope to keep people away when too many came.

RBefore I became interested in participatory democracy issues, I always thought there should be two shifts of juries and courts. One would be the conventional nine to five. The other should be four hours a night during the week night plus eight to ten hours a day on the weekend--for those working conventional jobs that they could not afford to miss.

Peremptory Challenges

I spoke about sortition juries for various things--one can say that this is a mantra for the participatory democracy movement, in the same that the free market is for many on the extreme right. In our conventional juries, we allow either side to remove juror's. This is in addition to allowing either side to refer to specific reason for bias--in an extreme example, a family member of the defendant by random luck is selected randomly. However, peremptory challenges can be used to eliminate those of a particular ethnic group. Justice Stevens wanted to preserve peremptory challenges but prevent what most would consider abuse. And, the peremptory challenge is a legal tradition and right going back to England. and

What is the role of peremptory challenges in sortition juries? Perhaps, larger juries, such as used in the Athenian System. where an occasional biased juror would be overwhelmed, is the answer. Could we have a jury on juries to handle the disqualification of jurors, instead of a possibly biased or bribable judge?

Thanks to the Juries blog for the reference to this article.

Jurors Researching the case with PDA

It is well known that jurors can't research the case on their own. However, Indiana is making clear this applies to social media, even having bailiffs collect iphones, etc. during deliberations.

Thanks to the Juries blog for the link.

Information on Juror Fairness

Lots of good quality statistical information and controlled studies on the behavior of United Kingdom jurors in criminal cases including how often they research the case on the internet.

Jury News

Another reference on juries not doing their own research ont he internet regarding the case. Should sortition jurors be encouraged to do their own work, possibly sharing it with the other jurors.

Jury News

I have advocated the use of sortition juries countless times here. Of course a question is what to do when one of them misbehaves. Should the misconduct, whatever that is defined to be, of one be enough to redo the entire sortion jury process? That is not the case in South Carolina.

Should the jury be allowed to do their own experiments and research? In criminal situations, the answer is of course no.

On the subject of juries, in trials, there is always the question of what should be decided by juries and what should be decided by the judge? There is a move that a jury should not decide whether a patent was "obvious."

I thank the Juries Blog for this information.