Jury Duty’s Waste

It is apparent from the articles on jail sentences for citizens who have been summoned for jury duty and don’t respond that the judges concerned don’t understand the real reasons why many citizens do not want to serve.

The major reasons are that it is mostly a waste of time because the legal profession has conceived so many money-making schemes that it is mostly an exercise in nothingness. For example: Because of unlimited preemptive challenges, lawyers can take days, weeks or months to seat a jury, on the premise that they are seating unbiased and impartial jurors. From my exposure to jury duty, the exact opposite is true--they’re looking for jurors most sympathetic to their particular case. We all would save millions of dollars and time, and justice would be better served, if the prospective jurors’ names were put in a raffle-type cage and 12 names were drawn and jurors seated without any preemptive challenges.

JAMES W. HARRIS

Tustin