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.
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
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.
People like the guy in the article "go off" on a lot of things.
I notice there was no wife mentioned in the article. He probably "went off" on her and she got a belly full of it.
Some people go through life pissed off about everything; it's a shame to see it in a 23-year old.
The judge did a very good thing and may have saved somebody's life.