The joke is that a jury is made up of twelve people too stupid to find a way to get out of jury duty.  It was put to the test by Judge Gregory Holder in Tampa, who  called in 246 potential jurors who failed to appear.

Hundreds of failed jurors sat in Judge Gregory Holder’s courtroom Friday morning, summoned back to listen to what the judge had to tell them.

They hadn’t shown up when they were called for duty Oct. 3, and Holder ordered them back to court. If they didn’t respond to explain themselves, Holder said last month, he might issue an order for their arrests.

Arrest?  Commit a crime and you have maybe a 50-50 chance of being arrested.  Of course, if you’re called for jury duty, they know where to find you, which is more than one can say about police investigations.

The judge first called Dovay Compton to the stand.

Holder told Compton that someone had called the courthouse asking for the Tampa resident to be excused from jury service because he was in the military. But Compton admitted Friday he wasn’t in the military.

Holder, visibly upset, said he had served in the military, as had his wife, son, mother and father.

The judge told Compton to sit.

Not satisfied with defying the call to jury duty, Dovay Compton figured it was a pretty decent lie that would get him out. After all, who was going to spend the time checking it out?  Judge Holder later admonished the group of American citizens, called upon to perform a vital civic duty, who chose not to do so.

People fight and die every day defending constitutional freedom, he said.

“We rely upon you men and women to come into court for a brief period of time,” he said. “We try to be efficient with respect to your time … This is your courthouse. You built it with your tax dollars.”

Though some trials can last for weeks, Holder said he recently tried two jury trials in one week.

“We’ve become a McDonald’s world,” he said. “We want it our way.

“But folks, this country asks very little of you. The state asks very little of you. Vote and serve on juries.”

Therein lies the fallacy of the demand.  Is that all the government asks of its potential jury pool, “vote and serve on juries?”  Granted, people aren’t particularly good at doing either, but then, there are a few things left off the list.  Pay taxes?  That’s a pretty big one, and hard to imagine the judge forgot about it just as some potential jurors claimed to forget about showing up.

And what about endure the plethora of forms, in triplicate, one has to complete in black pen so one’s child can have a lemonade stand? Oh, plus pay the fee and have the nectar tested by the health department.  Or get on one’s knees and be obsequious to a police officer who stops you for no particular reason?  Maybe it’s a meeting with a school administrator who didn’t like the shirt your child wore or the word she used on Facebook to describe her math test?

Jury duty has always been a critical, and distasteful, duty of citizenship.  I refuse to help friends and family escape the burden, explaining why the system fails when ordinary people won’t sit on juries.  They explain why it’s a burden to their jobs and families, but the true explanation is that in the scheme or priorities, it falls below pretty much everything else they have to do.

At  Court-o-rama (the least dangerous blog), Ann Skove’s view of Judge Holder’s admonition, the bane of everyone engaged in the effort of court administration, is reminiscent of New York’s former Chief Judge Judy Kaye.

We read stories like this pretty often. These judges provide a good reality check for people who think it’s OK to not show up.

What if we spent as much time on jury reform? Little things, like helping jurors find lunch and parking? Bigger things, like keeping those source lists up to date?

There’s no doubt that jurors were treated with disdain, to put it mildly, by the system. Herded like cattle and left to fester in dirty rooms with nothing to do but sit and wait.  Less then a thrilling experience to begin with, only to be treated like idiot children, while their businesses are left unattended, by uncaring officials. 

Many court systems have tried to make the duty less unpleasant, as well they should.  It should be less unpleasant for all participants, but jurors in particular.  They have eliminated exemptions to create the appearance of fairness, that the duty applies to all citizens, not just the most pathetic among us.

Yet this hasn’t made jury duty more palatable to anyone.  No one yells “yippee!” when the notice arrives in the mailbox, and the first thought in most people’s mind is how do I get out of this.  Still.  Except for the outliers, the small group with an ax to grind who want to be on a jury so they can apply their personal version of justice provided they can conceal their true purpose from lawyers and court in voir dire. 

Judge Holder’s pep talk, unintentionally, hits on something significant.  If our duty as citizens was limited to voting and serving on juries, maybe people wouldn’t resist with such vehemence.  If citizens believed that participatory democracy worked, they would be willing, if not happy, to make the sacrifice.  But that’s not all government asks of us, or does to us.

Between a loss of faith in government, and suffering the constant burdens of a government whose demands never seem to end, jury duty is one step over the line.  We pay our taxes.  We pretend to be respectful to cops.  We restrain ourselves from smacking the smarmy petty bureaucrat who informs us that we used the wrong color pen to fill out the form needed so can keep the dialysis machine in our dying child’s bedroom.

And yet that’s not enough to sate our government’s demands of us.  On top of everything else, it demands that we give up our lives to appear for jury duty, to participate in what we believe to be a failed system.  Comfortable chairs and available parking aren’t enough, and the other problems aren’t so easy to fix.  When 246 people refuse to show on one day for jury duty, the jury has spoken.