Jury Duty Again in Bushnell.
 

Got the Summons today. I seem to get one of these every 5 years from County or Federal Courts.

Should be very interesting all around as to what happens with this.

Summons, what summons ?


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They can come down pretty hard on those not responding either coming in or sending in the request to be excused form. I went down there in May 2014 after sending them some e-mails as not to blindside them about stuff after my April Jury Summons in 2014. Had a Federal Court Jury Summons in 2009 or so in Ocala. The judge dismissed me as he thought I was hiding something. The case was alleged employment discrimination based on race against a Hispanic cop in the Claremont Police Department who wanted to write reports in Spanish and other matters. I was sitting between two extremely attractive women so I did want to stay on the jury but had trouble answering the questions with simple answers. My life is nothing but complicated as far as my connections to the legal system is concerned. And even more complicated now in 2018.

I could write a thousand page book on my complicated connections with the legal system.

The Federal Jury found for the defendant Police Department and the City of Claremont but the Judge's written decision was a bit abrasive on the employers if memory serves.

The case in 2014 was some kind of vehicular homicide that would have taken up 16 weeks of jury time according to the Sumter County Judge who dismissed all in the Jury Pool after the lawyers convinced the defendant to plead guilty without a trial.

Pinellas County, FL Judge dismissed me when I said I had a law degree around 2004.

Sonoma County Prosecutor dismissed me in 1994 when I told them about my work with victims of crimes and materials in law libraries for them. The Judge said he had seen me hanging around the Sonoma County Law Library in Santa Rosa, California. I hung out in a lot of law libraries in the 1990s.

I had had a Sumter County Jury Summons around 2006 when I wrote them with some excuse about doing legal work. They accepted it. It was volunteer work but still work as in very stressful and taxing.

Print out what you just told me and you’ll be in the clear, LOL
Better yet make me a copy and I’ll put in on file for myself [emoji3]


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Jury duty
 

Do Sumter and Florida have an age provision for jury duty? When I lived in Maryland, people over 70 were not called.

I have a buddy that's never served on a jury.

If he can't get out of it ahead of time, when questioned in the box he manages to slip in.... "they have to be guilty, or they wouldn't have been arrested." :1rotfl:

Yes. You can be excused if over the age of 70. It is your choice. There is also an excuse if you are taking care of someone who cannot take care of themselves due to some kind of disability.

I will have to send the Clerk of Court some more e-mails about important legal developments in my neighborhood. Many Lynnhaven people would know what I am talking about here as would a large number of Villagers. It is kind of a private matter though made that way by the people involved.

LOL You have it so easy. I have had 57 WEEKS of Jury duty in the last 5 years. Yes I did. No really.

First in 2014 I had Grand Jury Duty which is 52 weeks long. You have to go for 2 to 4 days every month to hear cases to see if they go to trial. (they need a true bill)
March this year, I had United States District Court Petite Jury which is 4 weeks. It started on my birthday so I had to cancel vacation until July (I had it moved from winter because I walk with a cane and they said they wouldn't move it again.) So I made vacation plans for 4th of July...and...
I have Jury Duty for State of Alaska starting the 8th. (thankfully only one week unless I bag another trial). They said, no I can't get out of it because the USDC is Federal and they are state. (Bye by vacation)

Truthfully, I work full time and this has been a major hassle. I feel like I should be excused for life...and they should pay for my next vacation.

Yes. I think it's people over seventy. Last May my father was 87, and in a nursing home. I sent back the summons filled out informing them of his age and actual residence. He was upset he couldn't serve and I think he wanted to get out of the nursing home for different environs. I didn't blame him but explained he couldn't really serve.

Now that is citizen dedication. Hats off to you. I do try to go in most of the time.

I believe the Federal Court also have the over 70 option for being excused from jury duty if you want it. There were some seniors up in Ocala who were surprised they did not have to be there. And that they could just go no more questions asked.

Juror Qualifications | United States Courts

I do remember some people making undue hardship arguments to the Federal judge in 2009. And they were let go of the duty.

When you report, act as though you have a bad case of Tourettes Syndrome.

I would not disrespect any court in any way like that. I do have a little trouble talking when emotional as my Mom was sick the flu when was in the womb and had to get through many developmental problems. And there is a lot going on that would make me get very emotional depending on what kind of questions I might get asked by the judge and/or lawyers depending on what kind of case this is. Most who know me well on Talk of the Villages probably know what I am talking about here. I did mention it to the Clerk of Court via e-mails in April of 2014 when I went in for Jury Duty down in Bushnell. We never got out of the Jury Pool room and you are not really allowed to talk to others in the waiting room about much of anything.

I do take civic duties like this very seriously.

I am not a robot.
 

Just spent 20 minutes or so writing and then sending the Sumter County Court a rather involved e-mail. I guess it is a public record now.

You have to prove you are not a robot by clicking squares with various objects requested to be in them.

We will see what happens with this. I did write that I did not want to blindside the court with my quite unique experiences nor confuse prospective jurors by some of the responses I might give if the judge/lawyers asked me certain questions.

I did have trouble with this in the Federal Court in Ocala in 2009 with the judge's voir dire. He thought I was hiding things which I was as I had quite complicated answers to any simple questions. And these answers might have brought back a lot of very strong emotions connected with these experiences of mine.

I was called for jury duty a couple months ago, 5th Circuit. In the court awaiting voir dire, the judge was complaining about how poorly the air conditioning functioned in the courtroom. He said they should spend money and get it fixed. He then told us that as citizens there are three things we do to be good citizens. Vote, pay our taxes, and jury duty. And that if we vote "right" our taxes will be lower. Such a blatantly political comment was unexpected, especially from someone who had just complained that the government was not spending enough tax money on keeping HIM comfortable.

They said that they might be moving to a new building near where the Pinellas Park library is. This was in 2014. May 19 or so. I guess this still has not happened.

I remember the groaning coffee pot that sounded like a pooch missing its owners. This was the Sumter County Court in Bushnell.

Was this in Ocala? Home - State of Florida Fifth Judicial Circuit

Do tell....what legal developments in Lynnhaven? You can PM me.

I thought all lawyers, doctors, and law enforce got out of jury duty?

Not necessarily. In NM not only lawyers but judges can serve on juries. My guess is this harkens back to sparsely populated rural times. When attorneys show up for jury duty as they must, the trial counsel invariably dismiss them during voire dire.

One time I was called to jury duty in a relatively small town and was not dismissed until the final cut. The defense counsel for Volkswagen was furious at me and asked why I had not announced I was an attorney. He was quite a jerk so I stood up and stated that I had put it on my form which he obviously had read only belatedly. That was the way it was done. This guy really was obnoxious. I hope VW got rid of him before the actual trial started as my fellow juror candidates did not like him at all!

I have met a lot of attorneys who seem like real jerks. There are some really good ones though. My parents used to play bridge with Mills Lane and his wife in Reno, Nevada. He seemed OK and helped me with stuff when he was still mentally lucid. Had a stroke a few years ago.

My Godfather is a still practicing WI lawyer and we had a neighbor in Reno, Nevada across the street who was the foreman of the Grand Jury for a long time and another neighbor who was a National Guard fighter pilot/law professor/lawyer who would become an Air Force General at the Pentagon. I heard some very wild stories about him.

I do hope they look into what I wrote them in the e-mail. It should be very interesting for them. And that includes taking a look at my Internet foot prints I made since 1999 or so. Some of this has been on Talk of the Villages since I came on here in July of 2007.

Many of my calls to jury duty involved lawsuits against insurance companies or businesses. If I was called as part of an actual jury selection, I always made sure my thoughts were known about stupid people spilling coffee on themselves deserve to be discomforted or people faking falls in stores or parking lots deserve to be locked up for lying .. Never did get selected for any of those civil cases.

Most of the cases I have been involved in as a potential juror have been criminal.

The only civil one was the Federal employment discrimination case against the Claremont Police Department and that City. And they chose a retired CIA supervisor to be Jury Foreman so I watched what I said when questioned by the Judge. Some of my answers to questions can get very involved.

I'm not going to change it but
 

I see a lot of merit to the English sytem. Trial is in front of a judge not a group whose qualification is that the CHOOSE to honor their duty or can't generate an acceptable excuse to get out of it. Service on a jury WILL/MUST destroy any faith in our legal system that has remained after life experience.
I would hope a judge will not be as influenced by such thoughts as it is a huge company they can afford to pay the XXXXXXX for their own cause of their own damages.
If, you are paying your atty $300 an hour and do not recover court costs, you can win and still end up with a financial loss.

I have actually served on a jury just once around 1991 or 1992. A civil case which lasted 3 weeks. My manager at the time was not very happy about this, but I received my full salary. A few years ago my former employer changed the jury duty policy to pay employees for only the first 5 days of jury duty. If the trial lasted longer than five days, an employee had to use their vacation time or or take those days unpaid.

One thing that struck me about jury duty, the judge is the boss. He/she says what time is lunch, what time to return from lunch and what time the court is done for the day. If you are a juror, there's no saying, "Hey it's 5:00, I'm outta here."

It will be interesting to see what will happen. I could confuse the hell out of fellow potential jurors depending on what the judge or lawyer asks about me. I wanted to give the Clerk of the Court a heads up. Things are even stranger in 2018 than they were in 2014 in Bushnell and quite a lot more than Ocala Federal Court in early 2009. It could have been 2010 up there.

I did write about in on Talk of the Villages. Both for 2014 and 2009-2010.

Just don't spend your jury duty pay in one place. :) Where I reside in Cook County, Illinois, jurors get $17.20 per day. That is the same amount I received in the early 1990's when I served on the jury duty for 3 weeks. No one gets rich serving on a jury. :)

Could not imagine having to serve as a juror for multi-month long trial like the O.J. Simpson trial.

I believe it is $15.00 per day unless you are off of work with pay then it is nothing for the first few days. This is for Sumter County.

I doubt if they will want me on the Jury with all my baggage as I have some kind of connection to just about every kind of case that might come up. Lots of interactions with survivors of crimes from February 25, 1976 onward, some with inmates and ex-inmates, more with insurance claims people through father, others through various first responders among relatives, etc. My Uncle Alvin was the Itasca Fire Chief in 1979 when Flight 191 went down and he told me about his memories responding to that with his people. Very traumatic for these people.

Got a call from the Clerk of the Court or her agent telling me that the Judge or a Judge down there had OKed my request to be excused for Jury Service due to what I had written them.

That is a weight off my shoulders. I just wrote basically that I am the primary care taker of my senior parents both of whom need the help at times. I have really not been anywhere since a week in the DC area in 2015. I do need to be around except for a few hour breaks here and there.

I would have liked to have served as serving on a Jury is a real duty of a citizen IMHO and a safeguard on our liberties to actually have juries even if some of the decisions made by them have you really questioning just how logical people are and/or are able to be sold a very questionable story by some lawyer(s).

I probably would have been bumped as soon as I started talking about my law degree and how I have used it since 1991 and it would have confused the hell out of the potential jurors. And it is even more complicated since Valentine's Day of 2018.

I could have told them about the 1983 Slide Mountain (near Lake Tahoe, NV/CA) mudslide on Memorial Day which occurred a 1/2 mile or so where I was working my last day at a food service concern at Bower's Mansion and where my Dad later handled the insurance claims of some of the homes destroyed by that massive slide. I have many stories like this of misadventures involving the legal system and my being somehow connected to them.

Then there are those 40 or so cases I was involved with as a Student and then Student Director at Legal Assistance to Minnesota Prisoners in the Summer of 1987 through early May of 1989. This was while I was a student at the U of Minnesota Law School. Many of these 40 cases had been covered by various Minnesota newspapers. I mean the matters that put these people in prison not the quite mundane legal matters us law students and our supervising lawyers dealt with.

And then my trip to Reno, Nevada in the Summer of 1989 as the cataloger of all the computer files on WESTLAW during the American Association of Law Libraries convention and how this return to the town I had grown up in brought back all kinds of memories. Including the 1983 Memorial Day mudslide and many other events worthy of various newspaper articles. Happy Birthday to me.

Justice has been served.

Actually it has as if people in the future want to see what I wrote the Clerk of Court in Sumter County it should be a matter of public record.

And I do hope that they are still keeping track of my internet footprint as I had requested them to do. Especially the one on Facebook.

I could have told the potential jurors about Harvey Wagon Wheel's bombing which my Dad also covered and my very educational encounter with that hotel security's team. He took me along to that insurance claim like he did to a few other ones. Quite a lot of legal stuff in that bombing if I remember correctly. Harvey's Resort Hotel bombing - Wikipedia Photos: Slide Mountain disaster, Memorial Day 1983

I've showed up for jury duty a couple of times in Seminole Co, and mostly just sat and crocheted for a day or two. The only time I had to get out of it was when I was a caregiver for my husband, who had Alzheimer's. Jury duty might be inconvenient, but it is a crucial part of our legal system, and is a civic duty. If no one served on juries, we'd have to go to another system. I can't think of an alternative that I'd want if I had to go to trial! And how long would you want to sit in a cell waiting? You hear stories about the slowness of the system; trying to get jurors is probably a big part of the problem.

Yep.

While most of us dislike jury duty and find it a burden...it is a small civic duty price to pay. :ho:

My situation is similar but it is two parents and a dog. The dog is great help sitting on laps and the like.

Sumter County has sent me Jury Summons three times now in the 13 years we have been here and on May 19, 2014 I did go down to what was a 13 week case but the defendant plead guilty so I did not have to answer any questions. We never got out of the jury waiting room. I did e-mail them my concerns about my hobby though and talking about that.

In 2014, the judge did ask if any of the jurors were lawyers or law enforcement people. I am neither but I do have a JD and my hobby does involve law enforcement-- web-sites for Sheriffs' and other PD and libraries' holdings and web-sites. But I have been very creative in whom I have asked for help in the past almost three decades with this hobby. I did e-mail the Clerk of Court of Sumter County about this hobby a few days ago as well as a few weeks ago.

This was my sixth Jury Duty Summons and I would like to get a seventh. Not until things improve though.

I would have had to hire a nurse to come in as a care giver for my parents to be able to do Jury Service. I do have several nurse friends here near or in the Villages but would not want to burden them.

I could go down there and talk to a Judge in private about my hobby and see what he or she thinks about it. I had questioned some Criminal Intelligence Detectives about it back in 2002 at the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and they told me they had mixed feeling about it. Both of these cops were homicide detectives if my memory serves. I did this in person at their headquarters in Pinellas Park, FL and also later on the phone and maybe via e-mails.

The hobby involves access to practical information for survivors/victims of crimes on library web-sites and that which is housed in these libraries as well as materials acting as a safety net for the mentally ill. My interest comes from some homicide cases in Reno, Nevada in the 1970s and one from 1963 also from Reno, Nevada. I have some kind of personal connections to these murder cases. I did e-mail the Clerk of Court about these and gave them some links to information about them I believe.

Almost all civil cases are tried on a contingency basis. The plaintiff's attorney takes all the risk and is not paid per hour. If you win, the lawyer gets a % of the verdict, if you loose, the lawyer gets nothing.
Jurors are not beholden to any special interest except hopefully justice.
Judges are mostly elected in this country unlike England. And elections cost money. When the insurance companies and the big polluters and big manufacturers use their influence to select candidates and pay for your campaign and election do you think that judge is going to be impartial? Give me a jury.

I have met a lot of judges as the National Judiciary College is on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. They walk around there often especially in the book store. Judges seem more logical than a group of jurors. And it often seems to come down to how adept the lawyers are with their voir dire and how much the judge allows.

Better education in citizenship starting in elementary school would help a great deal.

My neighbor the law professor in Reno, Nevada used to teach at the National Judicial College as did some of my Philosophy professors. One of these Philosophy professors wives was the Librarian at the National Judicial College. Home | The National Judicial College I have a BA in Philosophy and one in History from UNR and had started a dual MA or looked into it but decided on Librarianship instead after dropping out of Law School at Brigham Young University in 1982.

Served
 

I served on two criminal trials in Texas several years ago. I was actually shocked that I ended up on one of them. It was a murder case involving a shooting. I was asked if I was afraid of guns, which I was at the time. Then they wanted to know why. It was because I had been accidentally shot several years earlier. I about fainted when I was not eliminated! Juries are really strange, though. This was a clear case of murder, but we had two holdouts for self defense. The defendant had left the residence and the guy inside was hanging out the door, one hand on the screen and one hand on the door jamb, yelling at him not to come back again. The defendant said that when he got to his car, the guy was still yelling. He said, "When he called me a black *******, I reached into my glove box, got my gun, and I shot him dead." We ended up a hung jury because of those two. Instead of a retrial, the guy tppk a plea bargain.

The other trial was a child molestation case committed by a relative on a toddler. Sad!! Another messed up case...or so we thought. We had one gal that would not send the guy away for 20 years because her brother had been incarcerated and she "wouldn't do that to ANYBODY". We ended up settling for 15 years probation. Afterwards, the DA told us that was the best sentence we could have handed down because had it been for the 20 years prison time, he would have served maybe 4 or 5. He also said that what he couldn't tell us during the trial was that the guy had been messing with every kid in the family for the last 10 years; and that he would definitely break his probation. He then would be gone for the full 15 to prison. The judge sentenced him to an additional 30 days in the county lockup prior to being released on probation. The DA said that it would not be pleasant in there, either, since the general population usually takes a really dim view of child molesters. The gal who would not budge, couldn't get out of there fast enough when she heard what the DA said about probation being the better sentence.

Don't Mess With Texas! Probation means something there.

One of my cases as a Student Director at Legal Assistance to Minnesota Prisoners involved a local big wig selling some people stock that did not exist. The judge found our former inmate not liable for the monetary damages because the buyers of this non-existent stock should not have been such suckers according to the judge. And the Ivy League lawyer representing the underwriter said that the Securities Laws did not cover securities that only existed in the heads of the con man and the conned.

It was hard looking at these people in the Court Room who lost their life savings because they did not do their home work and checked up on what the local big wig was telling them.

This is public record I believe so I am not breaking any lawyer/client confidentiality and it would be very hard to find anything more about it unless you were one of the people involved in some way.

There was no jury that I recall just the Judge.

I too am waiting to serve jury duty. Several times back in Ohio I was called to serve but then send home as I was good friends with the Judge and prosecuting attorney. The defense attorney didn’t like my associates.:icon_wink:

Randomness of Jury Duty
 

What I find is interesting how some people have been called multiple times for jury duty, and some people never get called for jury duty. I've been called 3 times since the early 1990's in Cook County, IL. Around 1992 I actually served on a jury once for 3 weeks (civil trial). I was selected for another jury about 10 years ago (another civil case), but the case was settled out of court just before the trial was supposed to start. Then about 5 years ago I sat around the courthouse in downtown Chicago and was sent home around 4:00 pm, never getting selected.

Most of the people I know in Cook County who are registered voters around my age have never been called for jury duty or called only once.

I hope I haven't jinxed myself. I have no idea what my current employer's policy is on paying employees for jury duty. :)

With everything that has happened to me or to those around me I think I should have a warning label.

My Dad worked insurance claims on just about any hurricane, fire and earthquake in the US from around 1989 through 1995. That includes Hurricane Andrew and the 1989 SF Bay area earthquake.