Posted on 04/25/2003 6:36:04 PM PDT by FourPeas
Jail term won't alter juror's defiant attitude Friday, April 25, 2003By Barton Deiters and Doug Guthrie
Every day, defendants leave the downtown court building to head to jail, but Thursday, it was a juror who went to the county lockup. Brian Scott Lett, a 23-year-old Alto resident who failed to show up for jury duty earlier this month, was hauled before Kent County Circuit Judge Donald Johnston Thursday and found in contempt of court. Lett was handcuffed and taken to Kent County Jail, where he remains today. Lett failed to show up for three consecutive days of jury duty starting April 7, then left an obscenity-laced response on the court's answering machine, using the F-word to indicate that he had no intention of serving on a jury. Johnston said when Lett came to court Thursday, he was abrasive and unrepentant. "Basically, he said he was too busy to be bothered with jury duty, and he just had a terrible attitude," said Johnston, who said this was the first time he could remember locking up a potential juror for contempt in his 24 years on the bench. "This was the most egregious example of the complete reverse of a sense of civic responsibility." Johnston said the three-day sentence is largely symbolic -- he could have sentenced Lett to 30 days -- but he hopes the Lowell High School graduate gets the message after his anger passes. But at least as of Thursday night, Lett had not cooled down. "I brought money expecting to pay a fine. I never thought I'd end up in jail," Lett said from jail. "It's unfair that they are locking someone up and keeping them from their work because the judge had a bad day." He said he could not show up because he had no car and it would have cost him $40 to take a cab. He also had to care for his 1-year-old daughter and did not want to miss time at his maintenance job. Lett's name was called, along with about 100 other Kent County residents, to report for duty at the Kent County Courthouse April 7-9. When jurors fail to show up for court-appointed duty and court workers cannot reach them by phone to discover the reason for their absence, an order is issued for them to appear before a judge. The judge then is the one asking the questions at a show-cause hearing. "Typically, the judge makes arrangements at the show cause for the person to serve and it's over," Circuit Court Administrator Kim Foster said. "There may be a fine here and there, but jail time is rare." Johnston said he has chewed people out from the bench who did not show up and also given out fines. Lett responded to written and telephone inquiries with two calls to the court, according to Circuit Court Jury Clerk Gail VanTimmeren. Lett originally responded by leaving an obscenity-laced message on VanTimmeren's voice-mail. "We are willing to consider some reasonable requests for exclusion from jury duty, but we don't consider, '(Expletive) jury duty, bitch,' a statement we can work with," VanTimmeren said. "We always try to be very solicitous," VanTimmeren added. "His responses were rather nasty. He was reached at his job and he said, 'I'm not coming in.'" Lett claims he had no idea that his statement was being taped and he did not mean to direct the comment at anyone in particular. VanTimmeren, who has served as jury clerk for eight years, said most people are hesitant about jury service at first. "I've had so many tell me there weren't interested in duty until they did it," she said. "At the very least, they say it was interesting. They get a taste of government they haven't had since high school civics class. There's usually a sense of pride when they finish." Johnston said he hoped Lett would learn the importance of jury duty -- a civic responsibility people have fought and died for. "I hope next time he is called, he'll show up 15 minutes early," he said. But Lett is not making the honor roll in this particular civics lesson. He said he would refuse to eat the "nasty" food in jail while he is there through Saturday. He also said he had no intention of serving on a jury. "Next time, I'm going to tell them I'm a racist mother------ and get out of it that way," Lett said.
The Grand Rapids Press
If you don't want to be on a jury, why should you?Because the Constitution is everyone's responsibility, and the Constitution guarentees people a right to a jury.
Our ancestors did not fight and die for freedom, that I should be exploited as part of a shameless fraud to enrich an unregulated, out of control lawyer industry.Our ancestors did not fight and die so that there would be freedom from jury duty. As a matter of fact, in the time of the founding of our country, there was compelled jury duty. It has been part of our country since its birth:
Although we have no direct evidence, most men probably did not desire to serve as jurors.[72] At a time of difficult travel, few men would have cared to attend court sessions, and those who did probably were pursuing business interests from which jury duty was an unwelcome distraction. In short, there is every reason to think that eighteenth-century citizens avoided jury duty as eagerly as citizens today and that the chore was therefore distributed among as much of the eligible population as could be conscripted.[73]One can also see reference to jury duty in the Calvin Jones papers, which include a letter he wrote about jury duty service back in 1803.72. Under eighteenth-century law, jurors were selected by one of several largely random processes: they were chosen by lot from a list of freeholders, elected by the voters of the jurisdiction, or summoned by the sheriff from among the bystanders at court.
73. The one available local study indicates, in fact, that between one-fourth and one-third of all adult males served on juries. See Nelson, Introductory Essay: The Larger Context of Litigation in Plymouth County, 1725-1825, in D. Konig, ed., Legal Records of Plymouth County, 1686-1859, vol. 1 (Wilmington: M. Glazier, 1978), p. 25.
If the founders of this country thought that conscripted jury duty was an abomination, they had a funny way of showing it; they kept it in nearly all of the states.
A couple of hours? Surely you jest.
Your dillusional, and I can prove it. Call the court at the numbers listed above. Tell them you have been called for Jury duty but that you can't make it and see if they tell you that you don't have to come in.
Be sure and let us know what they say.
1. If I am unable (or unwilling) to serve when called, I should be able to pick up a phone and press "1" to opt out, without having another person determine if my reasons for not serving are valid.
2. I'd like to be able to serve on a jury remotely. Stream the trial over the internet, e-mail the court documents, etc. I'd render the same verdict. As a matter of fact, the verdict would be more true to the evidence, testimony and law, instead of external factors having nothing to do with the trial. (Bad coffee, frowning defendants, etc.)
3. Allow me to opt out of invasive jury questionaires without risking contempt of court charges. Most of the questions are none of their business.
4. Let me ask questions during the trial. It's a search for truth, not a show or a game. On that note, let ME decide what evidence I'll consider.
5. Hold the trial without me there, and then let me review the testimony and evidence. I can go through three days of trial work a day, thus reducing the amount of time I have to spend on it.
I've got a lot of other suggestions, but those will do for now.
Because I was a courthouse rat, many friends & acquaintances would call me when they received a jury summons, wondering what to do. If they had a legitimate hardship (self-employed, disability such as deafness that made it impossible to serve, sole caretaker for children or aged parent, etc.) I advised them to call the jury clerk and send a follow up letter. There must have been nearly a hundred people over the course of ten years who called me asking about this, and nobody EVER had to serve if they took the trouble to call and write a letter.
If it's just an "inconvenient time", without any true hardship, you can still call the jury clerk and asked to be "carried over to the next term". Lots of times, you never get called again.
In addition to the civic duty, public service aspects of jury duty, if anybody with a job can get out of service, do you really want unemployed idiots deciding tobacco suits, gun manufacturer suits, etc.? That would be a disaster. While a lot of folks here are citing anecdotal evidence, I was in the trenches for a decade, and I was VERY impressed overall with the jury system. There are occasional awful results (no system is perfect), but when you put twelve ordinary people from all walks of life in the jury box, it's amazing how often they get it right. And a remote-control system isn't the same . . . not only is a lot of jury work judging the credibility of a witness by his body language, tone of voice, etc., but there's something about the give-and-take of discussion in the jury room that gets down to the truth in a hurry. I've debriefed a lot of jurors after verdict, and my husband has served SIX times on both civil and criminal juries. They always elect him foreman (he says it's because he's the only one wearing a tie, but it's probably his honest face ;-D ).
Here's another problem that nobody has mentioned: jury pool challenges by criminal defendants. The rules about jurors showing up used to be much, much less stringent -- until a criminal defendant filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta, claiming that he did not receive a fair trial because he didn't have a jury that was an "accurate cross section of the community", in part due to failure to update the jury pool regularly with voter reg lists, driver's license lists, etc., but also because excuses were granted too readily. The Feds issued a very detailed ruling which required regular updating of the jury pool AND stringent excuse rules.
So, as usual, you can trace some of the problem back to Federal Government meddling . . . :-D
With all due respect (and sparing the lawyer jokes), your view was a working relationship from the inside. Certainly your interaction with the courthouse staff is/was not the same as what the general public have to endure. They see you every day and have to work with you. The public they see and treat as prattle.
Of course, I agree with your comments that people should serve - better to have qualified people deciding cases. My point was people selected for jury duty should not be put through the kind of abuse the led the guy in the article to go off.
Did the judge that threw him in jail make any kind of inquiry into the way the public is treated by his court. Of course not. He has to work with the court house employees every day. He is probably their hero now for throwing one of the ingrates into jail.
I know of a guy who refused to be drafted during the Vietnam war. It finally came down to being drafted or going to jail.
He caved and reported for duty.
He flunked the physical.
While I had an "inside view", my husband most definitely did not. The judges and clerks don't know who you're married to (metro Atlanta is a BIG jurisdiction, and I don't think anybody at the courthouse ever met my husband in my company, and our last names are different.) He never had a problem getting carried over to the next term, just a phone call was enough.
Of course, part of the problem IS perspective. In a large county, the staff are just covered up with work, and they probably process hundreds of jurors in a morning . . . say you have 12 superior court judges, and maybe half of them have a trial calendar on any given Monday -- you have to have two pools of 24 for civil trials, and FOUR pools for criminal (lots more strikes for the defendant), let alone the high profile murder trials where they may get through eight or more pools because people have formed opinions about the case (it's not that a juror KNOWS about the case, it's whether they've made up their minds and can't let it go).
The clerks are people too, and having to move hundreds of people in and out of the courtrooms is tiresome work. When somebody is reasonably polite and kind to them . . . no problem. But when somebody says "f*** your jury b****" or words to that effect, it's bound to annoy them.
And thanks for skipping the lawyer jokes . . . I promise I've heard them all. I even tell them sometimes . . . have you heard the one about the doctor and the priest and the lawyer paddling in the life raft through shark infested waters? :-D
SS He never stated those reasons from the beginning! He only did that after his other STUPID actions! If the ignotant idiot had told them he was a "hardship" case, he would have not been in jail NOW!
This is precious!
And rare.
A bureaucrat with a sense of humor.
If this judge had a habit of treating the public like dirt, this would NOT be the first time he jugged somebody for contempt over a jury summons. Bad judges do exist (I can think of two awful ones in my home county) but they have a pattern of high-handed behavior. They also get dealt with eventually - one of the two I'm thinking of was actually removed from the bench by the Supreme Court, the other was defeated for re-election.
I tracked down some information on this court. It's a fairly large one - county population 575,000, this is the general jurisdiction trial court and has a heavy caseload, and this judge is a former DA who's been on the bench since 1989. While ex-DAs do tend to run a tight ship, he's not a newbie who might throw the book at somebody when it wasn't really necessary, and if this is the first time he's done this in over ten years he's not suffering from "black robe disease".
I'll also note that this is the most egregious case of contempt I've ever heard of, aside from loony criminal defendants "acting out" in the courtroom and a few wild-eyed defense lawyers who like to bait short-tempered judges. I promise you that (at least around here) most judges treat jurors with the greatest respect -- that may be because we're in the South. But given this guy's totally intransigent attitude (even before the bench), the judge HAD to do something. Criminal contempt (in the direct presence of the court) has to be punished, or you just get more of it.
Certainly there are exceptions. There must be one nice courthouse employee somewhere.
In reply to your comment, their job is no different than any number of retail jobs I have worked. I must be nice to each and every person that comes in no matter how tiresome. Especially the ones that are in a bad mood.
It should be no different for the courthouse employees. But of course it is, as your making excusese for them shows.
And one of the reasons it is different for them is because the courthouse employees know the judge will throw the the &%#$@%$#@'s in jail if they get out of line.
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