How to get out of jury duty


I went to Hartford Superior Court for jury duty in September. Here's how it works: You start out in a big room with rows of chairs and a big TV in front and they play an informational video about the court system. Then you wait around reading or something for a couple of hours until your name gets called for a jury panel. At least, you WOULD be reading, if an office worker didn't come to the front of the room at exactly 9:30 and turn on the TV so "Judge Judy" could blare through the room, erasing the cuddly impression of judges you've just absorbed from the video. Aside from berating the disputants and flaunting her ego, she treats everyone like children, which does at least sort of set the tone for the rest of the day. Luckily there's a "quiet room" off to the side for those who want to read (or use their cell phones, which counted as "quiet" to a guy who was in there), or to just have the TV volume cut by about half through the closed door.

The jury panel -- 15 of us in my case -- was brought to a room in the far corner of the courthouse, maybe a different building even, the one where they hear civil cases. The clerk who brought us definitely spoke to us as if we were children, which was actually appropriate considering the jury pool. (Hey, no offense intended, but most people are morons.) We were introduced to three attorneys, two for the plaintiff and one for the defendant. They told us their case was between two insurance companies over some property damage caused by a couple of engines (presumably involving parties insured by the two companies in the suit). The description was purposely vague, since the case hadn't begun yet. Then they sent us out into the hall to wait while they called us in one at a time to get a feel for our attitudes and objectivity, starting with whether we knew any of the parties involved, or their attorneys. This is called "voir dire", which the video said means "to speak the truth". (It's archaic French or something.) This is as far as you should have to go if you want to get out of jury duty. The lawyers can reject you as a juror for any sign that you'll be less than objective, and they can also exercise a few peremptory rejections without giving reasons.

The attorneys were extremely polite since they want to make a good impression on anyone who ends up in their jury. So I was extremely polite too, in spite of how I may come across below. Most people are a little intimidated -- "will I be REJECTED?" -- but I went in with rejection as my goal, so the pressure was off. Of course, I didn't want to be a jerk -- I only planned to be completely honest. Here's how it went:

We sit at a big table in a little room, me at the head, Defense Attorney to my left, Plaintiff's Attorneys to my right, the court clerk (who led the jury panel around) sitting behind me. Defense Attorney says he'll go through his questions first since they alternate order with each potential juror. He's in his late thirties, big like a football player, eloquent, and he exaggerates his tone of voice and facial expressions as if he's become skilled at getting through to the very dumb and the very thick. Looks over my juror questionnaire form and notes my stepfather is an attorney; asks his name. (I tell him, instead of giving him a hard time about unnecessary prying. Then I remember, "wait, I WANT to give them a hard time...") He notes that I said I was a grad student and teacher, so what do I study and whom do I teach; I tell him psychology of language and all areas of cognitive psychology, at the intro level, advanced level, and graduate level. He asks if I know anything about engines, and I say not a thing, but I did just have to buy a new one for my old car last week. That gets him interested: he asks about all the details of the story -- what was wrong with it, where did I get the problem diagnosed and where did I get it fixed, was I satisfied with the information I got about the problem or did I blame my mechanic for not detecting it sooner and maybe saving my engine... I ended up telling him all about it in detail but at the end I said "you know, I doubt your case is about this kind of engine." He said, no you're right, it's not about Honda engines.

Then,

Defense Attorney: What was your reaction to getting your juror notice in the mail?

Eric: I was kind of annoyed...

D: Sure.

E: ...but I figured I'd do my duty if someone actually wanted me on a jury, goofy as it sounds.

D: You thought it was goofy... you had reservations?

E: I'm not the biggest fan of the adversarial judicial system.

D: What's the reason for your distaste for the adversarial system?

E: I don't think it's an adequate way to discover the truth about anything. You guys get paid lots of money to come in and put on a show, cast things in a certain light, and hope to persuade a bunch of people like the ones downstairs -- who would put away whatever they're reading and start gaping at the TV from the moment someone turns on "Judge Judy". And if they agree with your version of things, your side was right. But that doesn't make you right, it just makes you more persuasive. There should be a bigger goal than that -- truth! There actually is a real state of affairs out there that has nothing to do with how likeable or persuasive you are or how much your clients can spend. Our society thinks you have to set up every question as one side versus another, and the two sides fight it out and the truth will automatically come out of that. But truth isn't a dialectic function.

[I did say that last sentence just that way even though it's not very good -- but partly, I wanted to say something the lawyers probably wouldn't understand so maybe I did okay. I mean these guys seemed bright enough but I don't picture them reading Hegel in their spare time. On the other hand maybe they already heard that argument in law school and got over any qualms it produced.]

D: [long pause, note-taking, some nodding]

E: Hope I didn't ruin your day.

D: No, we're fine... Do you have any general feeling about the fact that a law suit has been brought? That is, just the fact that the plaintiff filed this complaint and has gone to all the trouble and expense of bringing the case to court, does that make you think they must have a good case, that there's reason enough to think the defendant is probably guilty?

E: I think it means that the plaintiff has enough money to pay for attorneys and to pursue this thing, and expects that the payoff of the trial or the settlement will be enough of a gain over the cost of conducting the case to make the investment worthwhile.

D: So it doesn't predispose you to believe the defendant must be guilty?

E: It's hard to say, knowing nothing about what the case is that has been brought. I know that in criminal cases most of the accused are guilty, at least there's a high correlation between being accused and being found guilty; but in a civil case, knowing zero about it, I hope I could keep away from that view.

D: Generally it sounds like you wouldn't have a bias then?

E: Well, some cases might be the sort where it was very plausible that the defendant is guilty, other times it might look like the plaintiff is being unreasonable; it depends on the circumstances, what the actual complaint is. Here in a vacuum, starting from nothing, I'd say I don't favor either side to start with.

D: The order of the presentation of the cases is set by law: first the plaintiff presents their entire case, then the defense answers the charges. [I may have that backwards but I think that's what he said; makes more sense that way anyway.] Would that order affect your ability to consider both sides equally well, for example, would hearing the plaintiff's case build up the guilt of the defense in your mind, which might be hard to overcome, hearing the defense respond to the arguments later?

[I thought that was interesting; they ask these questions no one would ever give a "wrong" response to -- because everyone thinks, "No way am I biased; no way am I incapable of hearing both sides objectively; I'm an intelligent and fair person." But by asking those questions they're just trying to get the typical dimwit juror to at least be aware of what rational thinking requires, and make them think they knew it all along.]

E: I hope that the order wouldn't affect me, but of course the whole point of implicit decision making like that is that it goes on beneath the level of our awareness. I can't be responsible for the way my mind exercises biases that I'm not even aware of. Again, it's hard to abstract away from the details of an actual case, to what would be my attitude in a vacuum.

D: Of course, that's hard to do, but if you could abstract away from a particular case, just in general, you don't think that would affect you?

E: It's a weird question for me but I think you want me to say it wouldn't affect me, so yes, in principle at least, I think I'd be fine.

[Now it's the turn of the Plaintiff's Attorneys. There was an hefty older guy, late-fifties maybe, who was obviously the guy in charge, and a younger guy who looked about 25 though he was probably a bit older. The younger guy introduced himself again and did all the talking so it seemed like he was being trained, being given some experience in questioning jurors even though I doubted he'd be heard from much at a trial. Although, if he's the one jurors have a relationship with early on, maybe he would be the courtroom guy too. In that case he was probably supposed to be the fresh-faced innocent good-natured plaintiff against the domineering captain-of-the-football-team defendant. At least that's how I'd describe it if this were a screenplay; in real life maybe he was a Machiavellian schemer planning the demise of his older overseer. As it turned out, probably not.]

Plaintiff's Attorney: Have you had any experience with either company -- the CIGNA or Hartford Steam Boiler insurance companies?

E: CIGNA is my dental insurer.

P: Any opinions about them as a result of that?

E: They do fine I guess.

P: The way a civil case like this works -- it's our job to show that there's a preponderance of evidence in our favor. Not that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, just that most of the evidence is leaning in our favor. So if we were to convince you that a preponderance of the evidence favored us, you would be able to render a verdict based on that?

E: Well, I'm not sure what a preponderance of evidence means. I mean -- I hate to mention it, it's such a cliche -- look at the Simpson case, if people couldn't agree that THAT was a preponderance of evidence, what could it mean? [Dumb example, of course, because that was a criminal case where the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt; in the civil case there WAS enough of a preponderance of evidence, and he was found liable for the deaths. Oh well, at least I could still hope they didn't know what "dialectic" meant.)

P: [changing topics to try a different tack, I guess] You said you study psychology. What area of psychology, what do you study?

E: What do I study, or what do I teach? Or do you mean both?

P: Well, both. You said psychology of language -- what's that? [Probably he's thinking: is it the study of how to willfully refuse to understand simple questions and give straight answers?]

E: Psychology of language is the area I study. We look at questions like, what does a person have to know to use a language, not just what words mean but what kind of rules do you use to put sentences together, to put words in the right order so that they make up a sentence? And how do you learn the rules -- is there enough information in what kids hear, when their parents talk to them, for them to be able to figure out the rules; or does there have to be some kind of wiring in the brain that gives them a headstart? Cause maybe the fact that language is so complicated and yet they learn it so easily so young, maybe that points to a kind of preparedness in their brains to learn those rules. Also how do we perceive language, actual speech, because there's not a simple relationship between the sounds we hear and the words we pick out; the phonemes -- the letter-sounds -- are hard to identify so what kind of machinery do we have in our brains that allows us to get them right? And once we know about perceiving speech, how does that relate to how we learn to read, since letters represent those speech sounds; what kind of knowledge is involved in learning to read; and in reading disability what goes wrong, what causes dyslexia? Is dyslexia really separate from general poor reading? -- because that reversing-the-letters stuff is all wrong, researchers know that's not the problem.

P: [nodding throughout] Hmm.

E: ...and I teach all areas of experimental psychology, cognitive psychology... how do we remember, how is information stored and organized in the mind, in the brain, so we can get to it fast whenever we need it, and what keeps us from getting to it easily sometimes? What kinds of memory do we have -- is short-term different from long-term, is memory for facts and general knowledge different from episodic memory, memory for things that happen to us? What helps us recall each of those kinds of memories? Is memory reliable or can we think we're remembering things completely accurately even when they never actually happened? What makes us remember things wrong, what influences the way we reconstruct things that happened, so that we impose our own prior knowledge on it, or even let someone else affect our memories by causing us to view the circumstances a certain way? How do we learn? Does human learning work the same way as animal learning, with reinforcement and conditioning? Is complicated behavior built up out of simpler behaviors? Is there behavior that can't be accounted for that way? How do our senses work, how does the machinery in our eyes and brains cause us to have the kinds of experiences we have when we see things? How do we know about the world around us so we can recognize people and things, and move around without bumping into everything? Do we start out with inadequate information that comes to us in light and sound, and then use our brains to figure out what's really out there, what's going on? Or is all the information we need already out there, we just have to look at it differently, beyond just measuring light intensity and such, and there's nothing to figure out, we can just use information that's right there in front of us so we're really in contact with the world? It's very philosophical. Do we have to learn to perceive things or does that ability come built-in from the time we're born? How do people think, reason, make decisions, solve problems? What kind of heuristics do they use as shortcuts when there's not enough information to make a perfect decision? What kinds of biases are built into decision making processes, how do people decide what's too risky to take a chance on, and how do they react differently when the same question is put different ways? Also, some neuroscience -- how is the brain organized to do all this stuff, which areas are devoted to which things, what are the effects of different kinds of brain damage?

[At this point do you doubt that I really said all of this? I really did. I just went through my Intro Psych syllabus in my head, talking out loud, and they didn't stop me so I did the whole thing. It was like two minutes, without hardly taking a breath.]

P: So to study those things, do you just contemplate it and deduce all your answers?

E: No! We're doing science! That means it's not good enough to just come up with explanations, we also have to test them. We have to figure out a way to make the behavior or mental process observable somehow, so it's NOT just a story we come up with. That means we have to tie every possibly fuzzy concept to something completely objective -- a reaction time, accuracy on some kind of memory test, an exam score, a particular choice that gets made. You have to have operational definitions, something that represents the thing you CAN'T point to, like "memory", as something you CAN point to, like "marks on a piece of paper". Your whole theory, your whole science, depends on how well you can make that connection. And you have to arrange your observations so that they tell you whether your model, your version of how the process works, is actually right; or if real-life memory or perceiving or whatever it is actually works differently from the way your model says it should. Then you adjust your model to fit your data. And to draw your conclusions you have to test lots of people so you're not just relying on how one particular person's mind works. And to interpret all the data you collect, you usually have to use statistics to make sense of it all and find out what's going on that's common to everyone; sometimes you need really complicated statistics just to see whether your model is in agreement with the results of your experiment.

P: Okay. You mentioned statistics, that's good, because it gives me another way of putting this question about the weight of the evidence. Because you could imagine that both sides make their cases about equally, but one side has just a little more evidence on their side, say 51% of the evidence. [Apparently this hypothetical percentage was the statistical insight he was aiming for... (sorry, no need for me to be nasty).] Imagine it's like a see-saw, just about balanced, but you look closely and you can see it's tilted just a little bit in one direction, which in our case would be like a preponderance of the evidence that we wanted you to consider. Could you find for the side that demonstrated that kind of preponderance of evidence, say 51% of the evidence?

E: That's a really weird question, because in the case of the see-saw, I could imagine a bunch of sandbags on each side, maybe 51 on one side and 49 on the other, and the first side would have 51% of the weight. But what on earth could it possibly mean to have 51% of the evidence on your side? How would you weigh it? It's the operational definition concept again. Do you mean, what if 51% of the sentences I heard favored your side? What could I count to come up with that 51%? Preponderance is still sort of vague.

P: Well, I see what you mean. How about this... you seem pretty independent-minded about the legal system...

E: It's not exactly like I'm plotting the overthrow of the government, though I'd be happy if Ralph Nader did it.

[A bit of sympathetic laughter from both sides of the table -- meaning what? "Go Nader, the candidate favored by corporate lawyers?"]

P: But in this case we'd just be asking you to decide a case based on the established principles, a preponderance of the evidence, as described in the instructions the judge would give to the jury. So in that case, would you be able to decide according to those instructions?

E: I don't think I could decide a case that might involve a large settlement, thousands, maybe millions of dollars for all I know, just based on an arbitrary standard: "one side seems to have presented a better case than the other." I would only want to make that decision if I were convinced one side was right and deserving of a judgement. I would have to be able to commit myself to a particular account of what happened and who's at fault -- not just say, "it seems this side won the game."

P: But if the judge's instructions said that that's what you were supposed to do, go with the preponderance of the evidence?

E: It would be morally wrong, for me to make that kind of decision in a case if I wasn't able to commit myself to the rightness of one side. Regardless of what the judge said. And it would be morally wrong for any of those people waiting out in the hall to do it too, but that probably won't occur to them.

P: What I'm trying to get at is... [long, long pause, smiling, considering his words, moving his lips silently -- I'm not kidding, this was the portrait of exasperation]

E: [whispered encouragingly] Spit it out...

P: [Smiling still, very slow, "this is the ultimate thing I want to know":] Do you feel that you would be able to render a verdict, regardless of the details of the case, in favor of the side with more evidence supporting it? [Was he really just not getting it?]

E: As I said, I have a hard time abstracting away from the nature of any particular case's evidence, which in real life might affect me in different ways. Seems there could be a lot of evidence on one side and just a little on the other side, but maybe it would be a little evidence that mattered more to me... the amount of evidence is just an abstraction; I'd have to be able to commit to one side. I could go on some more but I think you're looking for the one-word version, finally, which would be "No."

P: Okay... Well, that's about it, I have just one more question... Does the fact that both the plaintiff and the defendant are insurance companies, does that affect you or bias you in any way as to how you're likely to judge?

E: The fact that the two parties are both insurance companies makes me not care at all who wins. And I'm not too worried about "should I find for CIGNA in this case, to preserve my dental insurance?"

P: No, that's probably not at issue. So do you have any questions?

E: Nope, everything seems pretty clear.

P: Okay then, thanks.

Defense Attorney: Thank you.

Then the clerk -- small, about sixty, very professional looking -- brought me back out into the hall and asked me to wait a minute. There was no one else there, because it was 12:30 and she'd told the rest of the jury panel they could go to lunch and return at 2:00. She went back in, then came out ten seconds later and said "You were rejected." She tried to make me feel better by telling me how people from various groups are often rejected because their religion prohibits them from standing in judgement or something like that. I'd have to go back to the jury pool after lunch but she said it was obvious I wouldn't get picked for any jury. (As it turned out, when I did get back at 2:00 they just said they had all the jurors they needed that day so I was free to go.) The clerk had the kindergarten-teacher-act down pretty well since her job meant she had to shepherd around many people who needed very explicit shepherding. But she broke out of it and asked me what kind of psychology I studied since she always assumed psychology was all about therapy and that sort of thing. I told her it was pretty much what I had described - brain processes rather than family troubles. She thought that was interesting. Then she said she agreed with me about the courts, it was a really bad system and it's no way to get justice. She thought that instead of a naive jury instructed to follow generic rules, there should be some kind of panel of expert arbitrators whose job it was to investigate the cases thoroughly and make the decisions. Exactly, I said. (Not that there wouldn't be problems with that, too, but it seems worth a try.) So then I wondered, do the lawyers also think it's a bad system, but can't say so? And how many annoying, obstinate, thinks-he's-better-than-everyone-else, know-it-alls like me did they encounter daily? Well, at least I was nice about it.

Anyway, if you want to avoid jury duty, this approach will probably work.