Reducing Wrongful Convictions: Better Juries

The most critical means of reducing wrongful convictions is to have better juries. When you consider being summoned for jury duty, what is your reaction? Dread? Annoyance?

If so, you're part of the problem.

Now, I suspect you consider yourself to be of above average intelligence. (And if you have good enough taste to be reading this blog, it's probably true!) So look at it this way: someone is going to be on that jury. Wouldn't you rather it to be someone with half a clue? Think of all the really horribly stupid people that could be sitting in that seat instead of you.

Now look at it another way: you're the one on trial for your life. Do you really want all the intelligent, reasonable people like you to be the ones avoiding jury duty? Leaving you at the mercy of imbeciles? Probably not. Do unto others...

(Quoting Jesus, not maxim 13. Just so we're clear.)

So if you really don't think you'd do a good job, or can't afford the time, fine. But don't try to avoid jury duty just for the personal unpleasantness of it. It's just not cool.

And I'm not going to lie. Jury duty for me wasn't that fun. It wasn't the worst experience of my life, by any means, and I'm glad I did it. But dealing with the kinds of evidence involved in some crimes is not easy. If you can't handle a particular kind of case, they'll probably dismiss you. This is definitely a job, not playtime.

Now there are, of course, other factors besides personal preference that might keep you from serving on a jury. In the United States, your employer has no legal obligation to pay you while you're serving on a jury. That makes it functionally impossible for many people to serve. Spending a week on jury duty at $40 a day is a huge hit to someone who would otherwise have been working a full-time job at $15/hour. For a lot of people, that may be the difference between making rent and not. Juror pay should be at least the usual hourly rate of the juror, with some maximum cap at or above the average wage of the United States. If determining that is too complex, just pay everyone the maximum.

How much money are we talking about spending? There are something like 154,000 jury trials in the US each year. Figure 14 jurors per trial, and that the average trial lasts five days. Add in a little for all the jurors that are summoned but not selected. That means compensating juries costs the US something north of half a billion dollars a year.

I'm suggesting we increase the daily pay by a factor of, say, four, to roughly $20/hour. So we're talking about spending an extra two billion dollars a year, divided among the fifty states and the federal government. We're definitely in the realm of fiscal possibility; that's less than the cost of invading and occupying Iraq for one day. And we actually get something for this!

Other costs need to be accounted for. Jurors may have other non-job obligations, like child or elder care. Assistance should be provided for that as well.

In theory your employer can't fire you for jury duty, either, but that only matters if you can prove that was the reason in a court of law. Good luck proving that! Unfortunately I don't have a good idea for correcting that without throwing out the entire concept of at-will employment. That would have huge ramifications beyond the jury system, so we're just not going to talk about that right now.

We also need to spend some resources educating people as to what jury duty actually involves. (Maybe a blog post...) A lot of people dread it for no defined reason at all. Many have never been summoned. Schools should focus some time on this. One interesting thought might be to show informational videos on the subject at the DMV. After all, you're going to be in that line for three hours. Captive audience!