Dodged a biological bullet!

[thewayne]

Early March received a summons for jury duty.

Now, normally, I wouldn't mind that. But these are far from normal times.

In addition to the fact that we currently have a plague throughout the nation, I have no active immune system! While I have received both shots, we really have no idea how my body will react if I were to get infected. I can weather the flu, or a cold, or sinus infections. Covid is a whole new ballgame, and one that I would rather not play if I can avoid it.

Add to that, the quality of our local hospital is very dubious. Honestly, you do not want to hear some of the stories that I know. From personal experience, when I had a kidney stone and went to the ER, the PA who saw me - not a doctor - somehow claimed that I had a 6.5mm kidney stone. Nowhere on the reports was the number 6.5 to be found. It was a 2.5 or 3.5mm stone. Apparently reading is not a skill required to be a PA.

ANYWAY, I emailed my immunologist, and he said NO, I should absolutely not serve on jury duty and he would provide a letter. I fill out the online questionaire and under the medical problem I put that I have an immune disorder and my body doesn't produce antibodies and that my doctor thinks it would be dangerous for me to serve during the pandemic, I will provide a letter as soon as he mails one to me. They also have a PDF form that you can download and print. Oddly, it's not one that you can fill-out online and print directly: you have to print it and either type on it or fill it out by hand.

So I email the form to my doc, along with all the information for them to fill in the blanks. As it happens, I also have an appointment with him coming up (it was yesterday, all is well). And the next day I get an email from him with the PDF returned. All that was in it was the description saying "Mr. West has been a patient since 2009 (describes condition) and serving during the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic or flu season could result in serious illness or hospitalization blah blah blah." It was well-done and fairly scary.

Two weeks ago was my week off work, and I keep meaning to get down to Alamo and take care of this, but I keep getting distracted by other stuff that I need to do. And in my brain I'm thinking that the jury duty service was later in April.

It wasn't. I was supposed to report for duty on April 1.

I found this out when I looked at my paperwork on April 2. At around lunch time. And Russet was out getting an echocardiogram.

I had no idea what they did if you didn't report when you were supposed to: did they issue a warrant for the first offense?

For various reasons, I didn't want to leave the dogs alone. She got here and I headed out. There are two court complexes in Alamo, I went to the closest. There were hardly any cars there, so obviously I had gone to the wrong one. Still, I went in, and no one was in the lobby, but the door was not locked so that was a good sign. I apologized to the clerk, she said there had been no cases on the 1st, so no big deal. Anyway, I needed to go to the main court house at the other location, so back in the car and start driving again.

It wasn't remotely a straight path because they're building a dedicated left turn lane at the blind school where I used to work, and that's keeping that intersection screwed up for a year. I get around that, and eventually get to the right court house. Naturally, this one has proper security, which takes a bit to get through. I get there - before 5 pm - and find out everyone from jury services has gone home for the weekend.

Huh. Maybe calling when I figured out that I'd screwed up might have been a good idea.

NAH. Driving down in a rush and squirreling about was clearly much more sensible!

SO, I text my boss and tell her that I MIGHT be on jury duty Monday morning. Get up awfully bloody early, I'm at the court house before they open. The lobby is open, all the windows are closed. There's actually someone there before me: I think he's there to pay a fine or something, he goes to a different window when they open. I go to the jury pool window, guy takes my number and looks it up.

I had been excused. They either did not send the notice or it has not arrived in the mail yet.

Funny they didn't bother with this new-fangled invention they've got called E-MAIL.

Apparently my original response was good enough, and they didn't need the two letters from my doctor.

Ah, I didn't mention the second letter. When I have an appointment with my immunologist, I need bloodwork done. I have them mail it to me and I carry it to the lab, and they included another letter from my doc. So I had the PDF of the official 'get out of jury duty free for medical reasons' form plus this second letter on me when I went that Monday morning to find out my fate.

But the PDF by itself was problematic: while it had a very good response by the doctor: it had no other information! It didn't have my badge number, the summons number, court number, it didn't even have my name! And there were strict warnings that the form could not be altered, so I didn't want to make any changes to it by adding those pieces without someone from that department seeing me do it.

I found everything more than a bit stressful, and in the end, it was all meaningless as I had already been excused and didn't know it!

Comments

Hospital "fun"

[moxie_man]

On a scout camping trip in far DownEast Maine, a scout didn't listen to us and went clamming barefoot. Yup, cut his foot open on a clam shell. Too deep for us to properly clean it. So, 30 mile drive to the nearest hospital in Machias. Walk into the ER...no one about. There's a little sign by a phone: Please call (extension) for assistance.

Obviously, they don't normally deal with real walk-in emergencies.

[rain_gryphon]

A jury summons is technically a court summons as imperative any other, but here, at least, they don't bother to enforce them with 'failure to appear' warrants, etc., unless someone's being publicly defiant about it. I think the general feeling is that if someone doesn't want to be on the jury, they're wasting time tying to force them.

I've only been on one jury myself, which was actually kind of interesting. You get paid some utter pittance, but they treat you to lunch and dinner, and there's doughnuts and stuff.

Re: Hospital "fun"

[thewayne]

Wow.  I've heard of unmanned ERs, but never heard of someone I knew actually encountering one. I should tell you my friend's scouting story some time, involved a trip harvesting "holly". :-)

[thewayne]

Apparently it's the third time you don't appear without any contact that they'll issue a bench warrant, but as I'd already been excused without me knowing it, I was already in the clear.  I've served on one jury, back around '83 or thereabouts - come to think about it, they probably chose me because I was close to the defendant's age - and it was a good experience.  Screwy case, though.  I plan on posting about it soon.

[kathmandu]

Yeech, what a lot of panic and urgency. And at this time.

At least you're in the clear and safe; it just highlights the importance of good communications.

[thewayne]

Exactly.  If I had done my part promptly, no anxiety on my part.  If they had good comm paths, everything would have been clear and no anxiety on my part.  The issue is, there's no penalty on their side for there being no failure to communicate that I had already been excused!  I had no way of knowing, and as far as I know, no way of getting back in to their online system to check my status to see if I'd been excused.

[rain_gryphon]

I never really considered it, but they may have chosen me for that reason as well. This was in roughly '85, and I was only a few years older than the defendant. He was honestly an absolute flaming dumbass, and while he had very clearly broken the law, I don't think there was any real intent to do so on his part. Stuff just sort of happened all at once, and overwhelmed his feeble decision-making processes, and he ended up in court. I should post about mine, too.

Jury Duty

[moxie_man]

I got out of duty three times in Grad Uni. I guess they needed people badly in Lubbock, TX to serve, but as a full time grad student, I was exempt.

I have served once in Maine. HATED it. Two day trial. No food like what you experienced. It was an injury as the result of an auto accident lawsuit case. Neither side provided a completely convincing argument. Party being sued had admitted they were at fault. So we felt we had to allow for damages. But we also had a hard time trying to figure out what we should/could award, partially due to how poorly the party suing presented their case and partly because we were not given all the info we felt we needed in order to make a better decision. For example: Did the party at fault have insurance and did said insurance already pay for the injured party's medical bills. IE, if the bills have already been paid, can we ignore that portion of the claim? In the end we gave no more than the minimum allowed based on what little info we were provided as far as the costs that were incurred.

The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth simply confirming how I've felt for years. The only true winners in our court system are the lawyers.

[silveradept]

I am glad things resolved well and you didn't have any further summons to deal with. The communication channels for my jury summons seemed to have gone over well, although I think there was a certain amount of worry about the card that said it was essentially only a one time (or not many time) login, so only do the thing when you are sure you can complete it, and so forth.

Re: Jury Duty

[thewayne]

Oh, geez.  Incompetent attorneys on both sides?  That sucks.  Yeah, it's usually the case that it's the lawyers who win.

[thewayne]

Interesting.  Mine was a letter, not a card, and the juror and jury number provided a unique ID.  I don't recall my entering a password.  There basically was no reentry into the system.  If someone else got ahold of my letter - misdelivered, stolen, or something - then I would have never known.  And since the letter was just a normal first class delivery, these things do go astray occasionally.

[silveradept]

I don't think there was a password, but there was an identifier, Ave the system definitely wasn't going to written more than twice, I believe. After which point, if you did it correctly, there was a number to call and a website to check to see if your juror pool was scheduled for the next day. And the single time I've gone without an exemption (summoned once as a university student, excused for hardship), I ended up being selected for the jury, so I got to see the whole process end to end.

[thewayne]

That was the strange bit: there was nothing that spelled out to me 'call this number to see if your pool is going to be called'.  My wife has served before, I just couldn't find it.  I went nuts trying to find that phone number!  And another thing!  Why isn't that info online?  As a systems analyst and programmer, there's so much about this system that offends me!

[silveradept]

That's definitely weird. The county definitely had a page for us to check as well as the number to call. It looked like a static page that was updated by hand, for extra charm, but it was accurate, and that is what mattered.

Re: Jury Duty

[rain_gryphon]

Okay, that sucks getting no food. The procedures vary from state to state, I'm sure. We were allowed to send written questions to the judge once we'd begun deliberating, although IIRC, it was more for stuff like asking what a legal term that a lawyer had used really meant than for clarification of facts that had been testified to.

Re: Jury Duty

[thewayne]

When we were deliberating, seemed like every time we sent a question, the response was along the lines of 'I can't answer that, use your own best judgement.'  Not being able to get a statement read back from the court recorder for clarity struck us as really weird!  Wasn't that their job?!

Re: Jury Duty

[moxie_man]

THIS. This was what my group experienced. If we sent questions for clarification, the answer was "I can't answer that..."

What's the point of telling the jury you can submit written questions during deliberations if you're not going to receive an answer.

Personally, the jury should be allowed to submit written questions during the trial.

Re: Jury Duty

[thewayne]

Exactly!  Passing notes to the judge should be allowed!  "Tell the witness to speak up!" etc.