The jury pool system that’s currently in use in Marion County pretty much sucks. They issue a summons for the week, and tell you that sometime during that week, you MAY be asked to serve one day. So you have to clear your calendar for the week and let your boss know that you may have to be out one day that week. Which is pretty hazy planning for most industries.
Then after you’ve done all that and completely hosed your week, you call in for five nights running and they never call your group number. Gee, thanks.
On top of that, let’s say that you’re a self-employed dentist (who is no longer automatically exempt, same way vets used to be) who has a week full of scheduled appointments. How do you plan for that? One vague day maybe in a week. Where if the dentist isn’t there, not only do people who need his services have to be rescheduled, but so do all the people who just need a cleaning, because he is required to check them after the hygenist finishes up. So unless he has something else for his people to do, he has to give his hygenist a day of vacation, ditto his assistant, probably not his receptionist (who still needs to be there to answer calls). He has to piss off a day’s worth of his patients and find new appointments for them in his already-busy schedule. He loses a day of income and on top of that has to pay for his employees not to work. (Yes, I know this guy. He got a pretty much permanent deferral the last time he was summonsed. Sometimes the clerk’s office can be humane.)
It seems to me that if you can issue summonses for a week, then you can narrow things down a bit more and issue them for specific days. They always over-summons anyway (evidence being that I was in group 18 and they called only groups 1-16, and there was a group 22 that was called as well as groups 36 and 41, not to mention the several groups in the 90s, so obviously there were quite a few more groups than they needed).
So figure out how many veniremen you need for a typical court day, add a couple of extra groups in case you have recalcitrant attorneys involved, and voila, you can actually say “you are being summonsed for jury duty on date x, please call after 5PM the night before to see if your group is being called, otherwise thank you and your duty is discharged.” Now you have a specific day that you can plan in advance for downtime (well, assuming that you don’t get into a long trial that doesn’t finish up that day, but them’s the breaks), and everyone is much happier.
Back in the days when the summonsing was done by hand, I could see how setting up your pools for the week would have made for a lot less work. But this is all done by computer now, and there is no reason for the current system to remain in place. The computer could make things much more granular and efficient, and allow for jury pools to be summonsed for specific days, not for the entire week.
It would be a great service to those of us who make up the venire, because we could more easily plan our lives around our service. And have no doubt: Even if it’s a Democrat clerk who’s sending out the summons and saying so, it is an honor to serve on a jury. It is part of the bedrock of our social system and we have a duty to appear and serve if we are called. It may be messy at times, but that is part and parcel of this res publica…nobody ever said it would be roses and champagne all the time.
Oh, and damn it, could the city flippin’ validate parking for the venire? They ought to have an option to decline the pay in return for a chit for up to $15 to pay for parking. The pay is nominal anyway and if you have to go down there but end up not actually serving on a jury at all, the 15 bucks for a wasted day (that takes a month to be paid out) is almost an insult.