When you are being questioned during voir dire, start to speak at length about jury nullification and the right of a jury to acquit if they disagree with the law.
You'll be out of that courthouse and on the way back to your car so fast your head will spin.
“You’ll be out of that courthouse and on the way back to your car so fast your head will spin.”
I told someone that the other day but I said “tell them you belong to FISA”. Personally I welcome jury duty but they’ve never let me serve.
Not so fast. A buddy of mine just recently was unable to get off of a capital murder case in which he and I both went to school with the defendants brother-in-law since about the 5th grade. He knew everything about the case obviously because of our friendship with the BIL, and they wouldn't let him off. He wanted off, mostly because he's self-employed and needs to be on the job site supervising his guys, and secondly because he didn't want to have to look at our friend's wife after they convicted the guy. What do you say, sorry I convicted your brother of murder, how's the kids???
Don’t speak openly about it, just have the two words written down on a business card. Show it to the prosecutor and you are on your way out the door.
It also doesn't hurt to study up on any local cases coming up. That way you'll be prepared to demonstrate your enthusiastic competence to judge them.
But what works best is to pick the right date. In Massachusetts, you get to reschedule your service for any date within a year of the date they picked for you. So, the last time I was up, I rescheduled for the day before Memorial Day weekend. The day after Christmas would have been even better, but I was going to be out of town then. Even so, I was out of court by lunch time.
That's how I got out last time. The prosecutor asked whether anyone knew about jury nullification and I was the only one to raise my hand. He asked me what I knew about it and I spoke long enough that he asked if I was sure I was on the right side of the railing. Needless to say I didn't get picked.
And I didn't even get to the good parts about the difficulties of enforcing the fugitive slave act in the North prior to the Civil War because of getting an abolitionist or two in the juries and other early cases of jury nullification America and England.