Have you ever been summoned to Jury duty? Did you actually end up serving on a jury?
Was your experience like that shown in one of my favorite Oscar-nominated, classic movies, 12 Angry Men?
I have a Michigan drivers license which puts me in the pool of individuals that are summoned for jury duty in Michigan. I’ve been summoned for jury duty at local, county and federal courts at least 7 times in the last 40 years. For 4 of those summons I didn’t have to even show up as the cases settled before jury selection. Two other times I showed up but was not actually called by the judge to sit on a panel as juror or alternate because others were selected and empaneled before I was.
But today was the very first time in nearly 50 years since I was 18 that I was actually called by the Judge to sit on a jury panel and subjected to “voir dire"….the questioning process used by the judge, prosecutor and defense attorneys.
The case involved a young man accused of driving under the influence of ethanol…..a very common criminal charge brought in East Lansing courts in a town with too many bars and a lot of ethanol-fueled student parties. Those summoned for jury duty were mostly white with a few asians. The defendant was a black American, but there were no blacks on the jury panel called from those summoned.
In voir dire examination of prospective jurors, the attorneys and judge ask detailed and probing questions to determine if jurors know or have connections to any attorneys, witnesses, prosecutors, defendants, whether they have factual or emotional connections addressing specific crimes, allegations and charges being considered by the court and whether there is any specific reason for being excluded for cause. Prospective jurors can be removed for cause and attorneys can peremptorily challenge jurors without having to state a basis or reason for bumping off a prospective juror from the panel. Parties in civil and criminal litigation want to remove any juror whose experiences or viewpoints might affect their case decisions.
Based on the 2 other times I’ve observed prospective jurors subjected to voir dire examination…..once in a child abuse/murder case and the other in a vehicle homicide case, I didn’t expect that I would actually end up serving on an empaneled jury to actually hear a case. As I watched jury selection In those cases without getting called to the panel, it was clear that people who have connections to any form of law, courts, litigation, advocacy, lawyers and law enforcement…... like cops, attorneys and people with specialized expertise…... are usually removed from jury panels with peremptory challenges from one or the other side in civil or criminal cases.
The attorneys involved want jurors to be “Joe and Sally Six-pack” types and not litigation/law insiders.
Other people with specific experiences relating to alcohol, traffic accidents, traffic violations and stops or local government trying to prosecute the case also got booted (excused) from the two jury panels I previously observed.
Today I was not among the first seven jurors called for voir dire, so I again got a chance to see how those first seven prospective jurors were questioned. Two lawyers and a student with exams on the trial date were removed and excused, two others were removed on peremptory challenges….and then I was called to the jury box for questioning.
I ended up hitting the peremptory challenge trifecta.
They heard all about my interactions with the City of East Lansing. That included the single parking ticket in East Lansing that I received in the last 40 years, an inadvertent seat belt violation issued from East Lansing police about ten years ago, noise complaints filed with the East Lansing cops about loud parties, and 3 building permits from the City for the home superinsulation project I’m working on that I’ve obtained in the last 2 years.
Then I had to admit to all of the speeding tickets I’ve received in MI, PA, CO, KS and TX over the years, with the Texas road stop complete with being detained for a vehicle search by a drug sniffing dog (nothing found), as well as my history of membership in the American Civil Liberties Union.
And then, while wearing a University of Michigan Wolverines shirt in a courtroom in Spartan-istan, I described how in 2005 I busted Michigan State University for animal waste discharges to agricultural drains leading to the Red Cedar River — a practice that had been going on for the previous 40 years — from the MSU Beef Cattle Teaching and Research Center.
And I described my career 40+ years of environmental enforcement, advocacy, policy and litigation work that involved expert witness work, administrative agency and legislative advocacy, and consulting involvements first with the American Lung Association and then as a self-employed environmental consultant. And how I advised attorneys in environmental litigation, like my involvement in getting a $120 million class action case judgement against a Premcor petroleum refinery in Illinois. And then how I needed to know if the defense attorney was involved with any law firms that I might have tangled with in the past.
That all was enough for the East Lansing prosecutor, and I was peremptorily challenged and excused from jury duty by East Lansing 54B District Court Judge Andrea Larkin. But I also learned to appreciate further our system of justice by jury in these United States of America.