Using my powers for evil

I received a jury summons in the mail yesterday. Boooooo. I don’t want to sit on a jury! I have a friend who loves jury duty, but he’s crazy. (edit: I have, apparently, MULTIPLE friends and they’re ALL crazy) If I’m selected, I might have to deal with horrible people having done horrible things, and I have a really hard time dealing with suffering. I can’t watch horror movies – it’s not the gore that freaks me out, it’s the suffering. I’m far too empathetic.

I have a chance, of course, to ask to be excused. The most common way is to declare hardship; “I can’t afford to be off of work this long”, “I have no daycare for my children”, “my job is under deadline and it’s critical that I’m there”, etc. My employer is awesome enough to pay its employees for serving on a jury. I won’t accrue vacation time while I’m doing it, but I’ll at least get paid to sit there, regardless. So I can’t declare financial hardship. I don’t have kids to take care of. And “I don’t want to” is not a valid hardship.

But. A friend is egging me on to say, “I have a terminal disease and I don’t want to use any of the time I have left doing this.”

Which….is valid. Totally.

But it feels like a cop-out. I mean..yeah. Dying, limited time, etc. But, I’d be sitting at WORK if not in the jury box, so …..net time lost is zero, really. And money made, regardless. So, in the grand scheme, it doesn’t actually matter. But at work, I can feel like I’m being useful and screw around on the internet while I’m listening to meetings that don’t really matter. On a jury, I have to pay attention.

I’m likely worrying about nothing. In ALL the times I’ve been summoned, I’ve never had to actually serve.

….and because I just said that, I’m totally going to have to. Hopefully it will be a theft and not rape or murder.

What do you think, Hive Mind? Should I try playing the ALS card to get out of my civic duty?

6 thoughts on “Using my powers for evil

  1. Do you WANT to do it? If the answer is “no,” then fuck ’em. Your time has become much more valuable lately to spend doing something you don’t want to do.

  2. Not a cop-out! Most legit! I say get out of jury duty and go play outside instead. 🙂 Your time is too valuable!

    …I’m one of those people who despises jury duty. I was summoned for the week prior to my finals when I was a senior in college. I asked to be excused due to the fact that I had carefully tetris’d my schedule in order to get all final projects and studying done in time + you know, sleeping once or twice, and they told me no. BOOO.

  3. Ok…I almost get an anxiety attack at just the thought of having to serve on a jury. So I would personally use any means possible to get out of it!

  4. You probably cannot get out of showing up. That is the hardest thing to manage getting an excuse from. And I don’t know how jury selection is done at the court where you are summoned, so this might not apply, but when I was in a position to be considered for a jury I had to fill out a form. The questions were there to help make sure the jury was fair. (Have you ever been the victim of a crime, what kind of crime, etc.) If you get a form like that you can write on it “I was recently diagnosed with a terminal disease. I do not think I could pay attention as a juror, and I do not think I could give anyone a guilty verdict for any reason.” You will not be chosen.

  5. I was recently summoned, and it was easy to deal with. There was a number on the summons, and a website to register at as well. The night before I was due to go in, I checked the website. It said only people below a certain number actually had to show up. My number was much higher than that, so I didn’t even have to go in.

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