The Price of Justice
Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. You’ve been called for jury service and, because Los Angeles County is continually scratching for enough jurors to cover all its trials, the court may fine you if you don’t show up. But if you do serve, it can be money out of your pocket in lost wages.
That’s because area employers have grown increasingly stingy about paying for jury service. A new report prepared for the Los Angeles County Superior Court finds that about 13.5% of private employers in the area do not pay their employees at all when called for jury service, up from 2.3% of employers in 1995. The percentage of employers offering unlimited paid leave has dropped from 27% to 22% during the same period. Financial support by private employers for jury duty has dropped nationally as well.
“Shame on them,” says Tom Munsterman, who studies the jury system for the National Center for State Courts. Munsterman calls companies that don’t pay their employees for jury duty “free riders,” taking advantage of the justice system at the expense of companies that do subsidize their workers.
He’s right. Individuals serve, but the civic responsibility is society’s at large. Many judges and court officials could surely use juror time more efficiently. By the same token, however, private companies, often parties to lawsuits in Superior Court, depend on juries of capable and fair-minded individuals able to concentrate on the case at hand without thinking about lost wages.
Yet, as the number of private firms paying their workers for jury duty shrinks, the business community has fought even mild legislative efforts to reverse the trend. The last bill to offer tax credits to firms that pay employees during jury duty didn’t even make it out of committee--and that was years ago.
In the absence of state mandates or incentives, county supervisors are studying a proposal to require county contractors to pay their employees for a “reasonable” amount of jury service. It’s too bad, but apparently more employers need to be prodded into doing what’s right.
