Week 3, Entry 3: Jury Duty-a civic obligation and a hardship?

Suppose you receive a Summons for jury duty. You go to the court house and discover that if you’re selected for the jury, the trial you’ll be hearing will be a high profile murder case. It sounds interesting, possibly exciting, but then the other shoe falls-you find out that your compensation for serving on the jury will be $30 per day. Your employer does not pay employees for time spent on jury duty. You begin to look for a reason to be excused.

The average daily pay for jurors in the United States is approximately $22 per day. Here in Virginia, Fairfax County jurors earn $30 per day and Federal Court jurors earn $40 per day. None of these three rates are even equal to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for an 8 hour day. Some employers pay employees for time spent on jury duty, but in most states there is no requirement for employers to do so. Those that do generally limit compensation to a specified number of days, which helps if the trial is short, but what do you do if you’re assigned to a trial that lasts for months?

Only those who are independently wealthy, have substantial savings (and are willing to dip into those savings), work for extremely generous companies (and those are few), are chronically unemployed or are retired can afford to sit on a jury for a lengthy trial. Many who do not fit in the aforementioned categories and cannot be excused from jury duty are going to be looking to wrap up the deliberations and get out of there as soon as possible. The result could be that a juror who has doubts about guilt votes guilty just so he can get back to work and stop the financial bleeding. Even if a juror doesn’t consciously make a decision to vote against his or her conscience, the financial pressure could conceivably result in an unconscious decision to participate in Groupthink-as I discussed in yesterday’s post. In any event, the injustice that could result far outweighs saving the taxpayers money by paying jurors peanuts.

So, what can be done about the problem of jury compensation? Obviously we must pay more. Daily compensation for jurors should be at least equal to 8 hours at the federal minimum wage. Trials that last more than two weeks should result in jurors being compensated at a level closer to what they earn. Perhaps reimbursing jurors up to 75 percent of their pay rate if the trial goes over 2 weeks (and their employer is not paying them). One thing is certain-no one should have to chose between paying their mortgage or performing their civic duty. It is not fair to the juror nor is it fair to the accused, and if it is not addressed, we will never realize the dream of equal justice under the law.