Is being summoned for jury duty random?
The only correlation I’ve noticed is when I move and re-register to vote, I am subsequently called for jury duty within three to six months. It’s happened enough times and someone I know tested this theory with subtle but deliberate misspellings of his/her name on his/her voter registration, street names, using “Apt. 7A” instead of “Apt. 7” and in each case the jury summons came back with the same inaccuracies.
I worked in the district courts for the state of Minnesota, and to the best of my knowledge, juror pools there were assembled from voting rolls and driving registration records. So jury selection is not an entirely random process. In Minnesota’s case, it favors the politically engaged and those who drive, which I presume leaves out the poor and other marginalized groups. I would also guess, just in terms of accuracy, that people who move a lot are less likely to get called up than people who stay put. But I don’t have anything to prove that. Put the whole picture together, though, and I suspect that your average jury pool (venire, if you want the Latin) is going to be a little more affluent and a little less mobile than the population at large. Having watched jury selection more times than I care to recount, I think that actual juries usually shake down this way. Caveat: This is only practice in Minnesota district court, so it could very well be different elsewhere.
Raedyn: In the U.S. jury duty means you’ve been called to be part of the pool of possible jurors. You sit in a room. Sometimes, you get picked to be interviewed. Then you might be chosen. Often, you just spend a day sitting in a room. The system might be different because as far as I understand, the U.S. has many many more jury trials than under other systems. You get a jury for trials that would just be in front of a judge in other countries. As for me, I’ve been registered to vote in NY (but not with the DMV) for five years and never called. This suits me because I am the last person any lawyer is gonna want on her jury anyway.
i’m not 100% confident in my stats here, but i think that’s about right Based on what I know from where I work, the chances of an adult being called for jury duty in an given year are somewhere on the order of 5% to 10%.* So in a state with 10 million adults, let’s say that 500,000 are called in Year 1. In most states, you’re only guaranteed not to serve more than once per year (in the same jurisdiction). So in Year 2, all 10 million (let’s say) are eligible again. Of the 500,000 selected in year 2, 25,000 people will be selected again (that is, two years running). 5% of these people will be selected again in year 3. So in this hypothetical state, we have more than 1,000 people who have been selected three years in a row. Which is why it would be fairer for those who report to jury duty to have a three or four-year exemption from serving again, as it seems is the case in Maryland. * As noted in another comment, not all adults end up on the list of potential jurors – only those who are
