Theoretically, California residents must serve on a jury once every twelve months. In actual practice, however, the odds are long that California will not call you for jury duty more than a few times in your lifetime.
In fact, some people go through their entire life without ever being called for jury duty even once. A multitude of legal exemptions exist, including the following:. If you believe you have a valid excuse, write your reason on the jury summons and mail it back to the court. Even without a legal excuse, you can request a postponement of your jury duty. Anyone who has been charged with a crime, arrested for a crime, or is being investigated for a crime should hire a criminal defense attorney.
I will need your booking sheet with your court date on it, as well as your temporary license if it is a DUI case. A court can treat ignoring a jury summons as contempt of court, which is a criminal offense in California. If you forgot about jury duty, though, a San Diego County court will probably give you the benefit of the doubt the first time.
Ignoring a jury summons in California is also likely to be ignored even if you did it intentionally. Instead, the court will send you a second summons for a new case. While the goal is to select an impartial jury to render a verdict, each attorney will also seek to exclude any jurors who seem to be more likely to vote against their client's interests. While jury candidates are instructed to be open and truthful when answering such questions, the juror selection process is also where most individuals who don't wish to serve on a trial find a way to be excused from further juror duties.
If you are selected to serve on a jury, you will be provided with the trial date, and must return to serve on the jury for the duration of the trial and deliberations. If you were not selected to serve on any jury during the voir dire process, you can go home, and your Illinois jury duty obligations are complete.
You will receive nominal Illinois jury duty pay for the jury selection day, as well as for any days served on a jury.
Once your service is complete, you won't be summoned for jury duty again until Illinois re-adds you to the potential juror pool. Jurors reporting for jury duty or jury selection in the state of Illinois are expected to dress professionally, in a manner appropriate for a court room.
Most courthouses suggest dress ranging from business casual to business attire. For men, this means slacks or khakis and a polo or button-down shirt, potentially with a tie or suit jacket. For women, this means a professional-looking pair of pants or a skirt, cardigan, sweater, twinset, or shirt. As a juror, you are expected to maintain a professional and respectable appearance while performing your duties.
Hats should never be worn in a courtroom, and you should avoid wearing shorts, t-shirts, tanktops, or anything printed with logos or slogans. While jury duty is a civic requirement for all eligible citizens in Illinois, the state restricts how often you can be summoned for jury duty in order to ensure a fresh jury pool and prevent undue hardship by being summoned too frequently. However, the penalty for a no-show can be much higher. If you fail to report, you will get a notice in the mail ordering you to contact the jury department.
If you reschedule your service and then report on that date, you avoid penalties. Courts do allow you a one-time postponement for which you can defer service for up to six months.
You may even be able to select a referral date. Now for the question of what actually happens. At least as it pertains to South Florida, contempt of court charges and punishments for skipping jury duty are pretty rare. The Sun-Sentinel reported that in a full decade, only 33 people from Broward and Palm Beach Counties among the largest for population in the state faced contempt allegations for ignoring jury service or juror misconduct.
In that time, just five people went to jail. A few did community service. For many, the consequence was nothing. Occasionally, judges will round up jury duty scofflaws and give them a court date where they will have an opportunity to answer for their failure to appear and give them an opportunity to rectify it.
Still, it is worth noting there have been cases where prospective jurors were tossed into jail, ordered to do dozens of hours of community service or had to pay hefty fines as a result of their failure to appear.
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