Avoiding Jury Duty Without Guilt : But ‘Amazing Stories’ Outnumber Legitimate Excuses

Once there was a French poodle. It lived in an apartment. Upstairs, in the same building, lived a mutt. The County of Los Angeles asked the woman who owned the poodle to serve on a jury. That would be impossible, she said, because “the mutt upstairs would break in and the poodle would have a litter of mutt puppies.”

Judy Rivituso likes to tell that story. She calls it “classic.” Rivituso is the jury assignment supervisor for Los Angeles County, so a lot of excuses come her way.

Outlandish Excuses

Over the years, she and others with similar jobs hear volumes worth of amazing stories from people trying to avoid juries. Some succeed, most do not. But no records are kept of which outlandish excuses serve their purposes.

Occasionally a jury dodger gets so tense he mixes up his words, as in the case recounted by Tom Munsterman, director of the Center for Jury Studies in Williamsburg, Va.:

“I remember where a judge asked a fellow why he couldn’t serve,” Munsterman said. “The man said, ‘My wife is going to conceive a baby.’ The judge said, ‘Young man, I think you mean deliver a baby, but in either case I think you should be there.” And the man went home.

Then there are folks who use the right words but garble them, like the San Diego man who had a friend write that he was “confined to bed with a nurse eight hours a day.”

Prospective jurors in New York show such a propensity for couching excuses in arcane medical terms that County Clerk Norman Goodman keeps a medical dictionary on his desk.

Gerry M. Stevens, San Diego County’s assistant jury commissioner, remembers a man who provided the ultimate medical excuse without resorting to obscure language. In a letter dated last December, he declared: “I died on Sept. 28, 1985.”

Each year more than 900,000 prospective jurors in Los Angeles County are sent “Dear Citizen” letters informing them their names have been randomly selected (from voter registration or Department of Motor Vehicles rosters). With the letter comes a questionnaire. Can you read and understand English? Are you a U.S. citizen? Do you live in Los Angeles County? Are you 18 or older? A “no” response to any of those questions, or one of several others, disqualifies potential candidates.

Half of Qualified Jurors Serve

“Only about 28% qualify,” said Mary Fitten, Los Angeles County’s jury qualifications supervisor. “Of those, about half serve.” The rest get off for a variety of reasons such as financial hardship, lack of transportation, physical or mental impairment or the obligation to “provide actual and necessary care to another.”

Persons failing to appear in court after being called to serve on a jury panel get follow-up letters, noted Ray Arce, Los Angeles County’s jury commissioner. “If they blatantly disregard the letter, a judge can issue a warrant calling them into court. The judge can exonerate them or hold them in contempt. They can be fined up to $250 and sent to jail. Usually the jail is just overnight, but it can be longer. I don’t think there is a prescribed limit,” Arce said. Recalcitrant jury candidates usually decide to serve, and almost never go to jail, county officials observed.

Arce noted that jurors spend about 900,000 days in court every year in Los Angeles County, adding that some of them are paid by their employers while on jury duty, but there are no accurate figures as to the exact number.

Two years ago California stiffened its rules for selecting potential jurors. That made it harder to avoid jury duty, but apparently did nothing to stunt the imaginations of those trying to do so.

For example, Fitten hears from secretaries who claim they can’t sit down and Glendale residents who argue that their city is not in Los Angeles County.

Not everybody tries to slip out the obligation established by the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, which declares “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury . . . “ A lot of people consider jury duty a civic responsibility, and some get downright fanatical about it.

Wear Those Badges

Orange County’s jury commissioner, Alan Slater, recalled one woman who got obsessive about following instructions. “We tell the jurors to please wear their jury badges at all times,” Slater said by way of introducing the tale of the woman who, on her second day of jury duty, sheepishly requested a new badge. When asked why, she responded, “I forgot to take the first one off my pajamas this morning.”

Arce observed that even people who try to duck jury duty usually are pleasant. “Only about one of a thousand gets really nasty,” he said, noting that when they do turn malicious “They yell, they curse and they make racial remarks.” When that happens, Arce said, “For the most part we treat people courteously and then show them the way out.”

A Frightening Excuse

Occasionally, excuses are frightening. Christine Cooke, superior court clerk in Ventura, remembers when “a woman called and said she couldn’t serve jury duty because her daughter lived with her and her daughter’s boyfriend had moved in, and he told them if they left the house he’d kill them.”

On a less serious note, Cooke recalled a woman who said she couldn’t possibly be on a jury because “ ‘my hamster’s had surgery and he’s coming out of the anesthetic and I can’t leave him.’ ”

The two most common valid excuses to avoid jury service are medical and financial hardship, Arce said, adding that transportation problems and the need to care for dependent relatives come in third and fourth.

Serving on a jury can indeed put a dent in one’s income, because the monetary rewards in Los Angeles County are $10 a day plus 15 cents a mile for transportation. Inexplicably, the county pays mileage only one way for the distance between a juror’s home and the court, as if jurors didn’t have to go home at night.

Anyone providing necessary care for someone when no alternative exists can be excused from jury service, but an Orange County woman had to serve despite contending she needed to stay home to give her diabetic dog insulin injections four times a day. Orange County officials also recall worrying about a woman who declared she was “incompetent, and besides she was caring for three grandchildren.”

Until two years ago, when the state tightened jury eligibility regulations, holding any one of 17 kinds of jobs could keep a person out of the jury box. Toll gate keepers, doctors, graveyard security guards and lawyers were exempt. Today, only members of the military, certain peace officers and active judges rate automatic exemptions because of their work.

Automatic Exemption

Other states are more lenient. Automatic exemption in New York, for example, falls to a long list of occupations, including dentists, the governor’s secretary, licensed embalmers and full-time mothers, but not mothers with jobs away from home.

California’s limitations on automatic exemptions don’t do much to intimidate reluctant jury candidates from trying to use their jobs as an excuse to avoid sitting in judgment.

“We get a lot of excuses from people who say they are ‘necessary at work,’ ” observed Orange County’s jury commissioner Slater. “Of course, that is not a valid excuse. To get an exemption, serving on a jury has to be a hardship on the person, not the employer.”

Slater recalled one prospective juror who tried to excuse himself by saying, “I am necessary at work, and besides that for the period summoned I have a three-week vacation planned.”

Vacations are becoming ways of life for increasing numbers of San Luis Obispo County residents, leading them to the wrong conclusion that jury duty may be history for them.

Linda Millspaugh, San Luis Obispo County’s jury commissioner, says more and more people--especially retired people--respond to jury service requests by saying, “ ‘Gee, I’d love to do jury duty but I’m traveling the United States and I’m a vagabond now.’ I send them a nice letter suggesting that they steer back toward San Luis Obispo County. No one has refused yet.”

Bureaucrats who select and reject potential jurors are not made of stone. They tend to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible, and even when they require an unwilling citizen to do his duty, they are likely to let him or her defer it if the reason for not wanting to serve makes any sense at all.

Bureaucrats Can Get Tough

But once a someone is chosen for jury duty, those same bureaucrats can get tough.

For example, Betty Kane, Ventura County’s jury services supervisor, remembers the time a grocery store checker failed to keep her appointment for jury selection. “We called her at work,” Kane said. “We ordered her to come in. She said she was too busy. We said there could be a bench warrant put out for her if she didn’t come in. She said she was dressed up for Halloween. We said show up anyway. Well, she showed up in a French maid’s costume with a little black satin skirt and petticoats underneath. She went into a courtroom to be in selection. The judges that didn’t get her were jealous. I think she had a pretty good time, too.” But she was not selected for a jury.

A common excuse that doesn’t work is claiming a lack of belief in the jury system. “If a person says they don’t believe in the system, I always tell them to go out and try it and come back if there’s a problem,” said Los Angeles County’s jury assignment supervisor Rivituso. “Maybe 1% come back.”

Occasionally someone tries so hard to duck out of jury service that he double crosses himself. Allen Abersman, chief deputy clerk for the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, remembers when he was jury commissioner in Santa Barbara. “I got two letters of excuse for the same individual at the same time. One was from his doctor, saying he was too ill to serve. One was from his attorney, saying he was too busy because he was engaged in so many business ventures.”

Financial hardship excuses work for the rich as well as the poor, which is one reason movie stars seldom sit on juries in Los Angeles County. Arce could think of only David Nelson, Ozzie’s and Harriet’s son. He recommended asking Nancy Contilli, jury supervisor for the West Superior Court District, which includes Beverly Hills, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Malibu.

‘Other Side of the Bench’

“I can’t in the last two years remember any well-known person serving on a jury,” Contilli said. “I’ve seen a couple of them on the other side of the bench. Most of them just have their agents or business managers come in and get them excused on financial grounds because they would not get paid for the time they are on jury duty.”

Occasionally, a wealthy or famous person finds a perfect excuse, as New York County Clerk Goodman discovered some years ago when his computer sent a jury summons to a man whose name was on the voter registration list despite his having taken a new job outside of New York.

Goodman recalled, “I got a letter back saying ‘Mr. Nixon no longer lives on Fifth Avenue. He now lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’ ”