Should We Be Valuing Jurors’ Time Better?

By Zosha Millman | LXBN | August 10, 2016

Not many people are thrilled when they get a jury summons in the mail. But a new lawsuit in Washington aims to offset that.

A new lawsuit out of Seattle seeks higher pay for King County jurors, looking to up the basic $10 given to jurors per day of service in order to cover mileage and travel costs. According to the complaint, the payment unfairly precludes poor and minority excused for economic hardship. While right now there’s only three plaintiffs, the suit is seeking class-action status for other affected people. There aren’t many who are fans of the current jury duty system, but can that system handle the change?

Serving as a juror is a civic duty, and a civic right—arguably one of the bigger ones—but it comes at a cost. Many people find the hardship of requesting time off from work, often unpaid, only to be holed up in a stuffy room with no food and just $10 of compensation to be daunting. As civic duty goes, answering a jury summons can often be thankless.

The law varies a bit by locale but there are, of course, ways out of it, as Alexandra Figari and Robert Hirschhorn of Texas Bar Today noted:

Photo Credit: elycefeliz via Compfight cc

Most counties will allow you to postpone your jury service at least once. If you must postpone your jury service, you can send in a letter (but make sure you send the letter at least two weeks before your scheduled jury service), call the clerk’s office (but they tend to get an overwhelming number of phone calls), pay a visit to the clerk’s office listed on the letter you received, or request the postponement online if that option is available.

…For some jurors, jury duty is a legitimate hardship; however, the law does not provide for an exemption or an excuse. If this is the case for you, you should still report to jury duty. If you are called to serve on a jury panel, listen for the judge to inform the panel of the expected length of the trial. At that point, if you believe that the length of the trial poses a substantial and severe financial hardship, raise your hand and inform the judge of your situation. In many cases, there are enough jurors to make it possible to excuse those individuals with legitimate and severe financial hardships.

But a hardship exclusion can still be a gamble, depending on the judge and the county. While some workers have said that “hardship” is intentionally painted with a broad stroke, that’s far from a guarantee. Not to mention that there are folks who would like to serve, even in the face of financial hardship. That’s what the case in Seattle is about.

The three plaintiffs argue that jurors are entitled to at least minimum wage for their time, considering many workers aren’t given paid time off or compensated by their work for jury duty. The statewide standard of $10 a day (up to $25 in Washington) plus transportation hasn’t changed since 1959. That number no longer represents the average worker’s pay, let alone the hourly minimum wage in Seattle. And the plaintiffs argue that limits the diversity of the pool, as The Seattle Times reports:

At present, juries tend to be composed of people with moderate or high incomes — often who work for Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing — who might not understand the backgrounds of many criminal defendants and civil litigants who have their “fates decided by people who don’t look like them,” [Toby Marshall, one of the attorneys who filed the complaint,] said.

In particular, minorities and the poor represent a disproportionate number of those who come before King County’s courts in criminal cases, he said.

The current pay model means the poor and people of color, who face disproportional issues of income inequality and financial instability, are kept from participating in a vital democratic function, according to the suit.

“Juries should be drawn from a fair cross-section of the community,” Marshall said in a prepared statement. “A jury system that excludes certain segments of society is unfair and undemocratic.”

To some it seems like the potential for a slippery slope. The flip side of this is that minimum wage (especially the trendsetting $15 minimum wage in Seattle) is not exactly affordable from a taxpayer standpoint. And if the County were to try and match local wages in an effort to not price anyone out and keep the pool diverse —well, let’s just say that there’s enough transplants from Silicon Valley that it’d be a feat to pull off.

The ideal line would be one that wouldn’t attract too many as a source for scam, but that wouldn’t be so low that folks couldn’t justify taking the time to complete their civic duty. After all, an ideal jury is a jury of your peers, not a jury of just those who can afford it.

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