How to beat jury duty without even trying

Circuit Court for Montgomery County, Maryland. It’s a Tuesday in July. I am among the one hundred and thirty citizens summoned to appear for jury duty that morning as a reward for registering to vote and/or subjecting ourselves to the DMV’s driver's license application hell. Mid-morning, after a lengthy orientation, twenty-four of us are instructed to appear in a courtroom on the ninth floor for voir dire. Voir dire is fancy lawyer talk for the processes of winnowing down potential jurors by asking questions answered under oath with the intent of finding a panel of objective and fair-minded citizens to judge one of their peers. The judge explains the basics of the case. A routine tort claim. Pickup driven by a kid making a left turn on Bradley Avenue in Bethesda collided with another driver’s Mazda sedan. The Mazda driver was seeking damages.

What happened next will shock you.

OK, that’s maybe a bit dramatic, but a couple of things. I’m a lawyer and for multiple reasons would love to be selected to a jury. For starters, I genuinely would like to perform a civic duty and to gain a better perspective of how the jury side of the judicial process works. But I have often heard whispers that lawyers rarely are seated on juries out of concern that other jurors might grant their views undue deference because of their knowledge of the law. That’s the nice way of saying that (some) lawyers are prone to be obnoxious, overbearing, know-it-all jackasses.

I did my best to project a fair-and-objective-not-overbearing-jackass vibe. In the process of seating a panel of six jurors among the twenty-four assembled citizens, the judge asked only three questions: 1) Do you know any of the attorneys or parties to the lawsuit? 2) Have you or someone in your immediate family ever been involved in an auto accident? 3) Are you or someone in your immediate family attorneys or certified accident investigators?

The answer to the first question was uniformly negative and the second uniformly affirmative. Six prospective jurors answer yes to the third question. Two of us were attorneys, three were married to attorneys, and another’s grandmother was a certified accident investigator in Philadelphia.

In the end, five women and a man from our group were selected to serve on the jury. Dude wearing flip-flops and an Arizona State t-shirt did not make the final cut. Neither did the middle-age guy who told the judge that he didn’t think he could be fair and unbiased because a friend had been killed in a car wreck in China. Nor did the young woman who said she currently had a pending court case involving a car wreck of her own. What about the lawyers, spouses of lawyers, and grandchildren of certified accident investigators? Nada. Zippo. Zilch.

Disappointing. It’s not like I half-assed it like Arizona State guy or whined about being incapable of setting aside personal experiences to be a reasonably objective individual. Instead, I experienced discrimination by being a member of a targeted group: lawyers (and those who marry them).

But I wanted to be fair (see how objective I am!) and test my hypothesis about lawyer-on-lawyer discrimination. I don’t litigate in front of juries (I’m not that kind of lawyer) and therefore don’t have first hand evidence on the matter. For instance, it’s possible that I failed to project the I’m-not-an-asshole-jerk vibe as intended and was booted for that reason (a possibility one of my “friends” suggested). So to get closer to the truth, I polled several lawyer friends about whether they had ever served on and/or whether they had ever purposely excluded lawyers from jury panels.

My informal survey is far from scientific, but it turns out that lawyers sometimes do get on juries. And sometimes lawyers are targeted for exclusion based on their professional status. I won’t name names, but one friend served on a jury in the Boston area where she had to smack down a “vigilante” attorney wannabe who was attempting to coopt the jury. Perhaps this suggests both the pros and cons of putting a lawyer on the jury? Anyway, prosecuting attorneys in my poll tended to say they eliminate lawyers from juries while criminal defense friends want them. Make of that what you will.

I also found support for the conventional wisdom that if I lived in the District of Columbia, instead of just over Western Avenue in Maryland, I would likely have my chance to sit on a jury, since D.C. is so thick with lawyers that you couldn’t seat a jury if you started excluding them. I also learned that across the Potomac in Virginia, you can avoid jury service altogether by virtue of being a member of the bar – an entire state that doesn’t want us, as one of my correspondents observed.

This was the second time I have been dismissed from jury service after voir dire (first time was a drug possession case in Wyoming). But as my research has revealed, it's not beyond the realm of the possible for a lawyer to be selected to a jury, particularly if you don't live in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So maybe its OK to continue to dream. In the future, though, I will adjust my expectations and probably just show up in a Willie Nelson t-shirt and flip flops.