@50Mickey wrote:
There's a lot between throwing the card away and ignoring the summons and actually going to the courthouse and serving. In GA there is a top age I think 70. I have been called many times but only served on a jury twice. We have a # to call each night and you may or may not need to show up the next day. They send the summons to way more people than they need. But it ties you up for a week. All one has to do here is to ask for a deferral if they have a valid reason for not serving at the time of the summons. They will excuse you from duty at that time but you usually go to the head of the list for jury duty the next time. In the OP's case it sounds like she wants to serve. For many of us we would have serious concerns about sitting on a jury day after day for possibly weeks during a pandemic. I don't think the courts want to put people in a situation where they are so concerned about getting sick they they would not make attentive jurors.
I served on a felony murder case. it was not fascinating at all. The jury is sent out of the courtroom over and over all day while the attorneys argue in front of the judge. The case resulted in a hung jury.
@50Mickey It's not that I want to serve. I feel like it is my duty to do so. It's a lot like my workout at the gym. I despise running, but I make myself do it becasue I know it is good for me. Actually, I don't even want to go to the gym, but running is the worst part of it.
Last time I went for local jury duty which was a couple of years ago, everybody showed up in one of the courtrooms. First, they verified that everyone was there and then they started going through the reasons for excuse. Once they had finsihed with the ones that would automatically be excused for cause. They looked at how many they had left. They knew how many they needed for the cases scheduled, so they then allowed more excuses for very little reason at all as long as they kept the core number that they needed. But, they said that often once the defendants realized that court was actually going to happen, they would then plea bargain. That particular week, a lot of the pool got sent home on Wednesday.
They were really sneaky about how they did it though. First, they sent a bunch home for the rest of the day and told them to return the following day. The people left behind, of course, thought that meant they were going to be pulled for a jury. After all those people left, they then told the rest of us that we were released.
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