Jury Duty: Two Days, Two Trials, Two Words, One Hundred Thousand Dollars
June 18, 2008 – 1:10 pmI
I was called for jury duty on Monday. In New York City — and maybe state-wide, I’m not certain — you are expected to serve for the greater of one trial (which can go on for hours or weeks) or two days. How it works:
- Roughly 500 people are called in and sit in this big room.
- A clerk calls out roughly 30-35 names at a time, once per case going to trial. Those 30-35 people make up the jury selection pool for that case, although another round can be called if need be.
- If you are called and selected, congrats, you’re serving on a case. Otherwise, you go back to the group of 500. For one of the cases called during my brief tenure, eight jurors (all women aged 25-45, from what I could gather) were selected.
In my case, I never made it to step two. Three trials were called but the third panel never reached trial; maybe the case settled, maybe the parties went the bench trial verdict, who knows? Just over 100 of the 500 people were called — I was not one of them. In fact, during the two days, I spoke a total of two words to the clerks: “Oops, sorry,” after one noted that I failed to sign my summons.
For 400 of the 500 people in attendance, the experience was mostly the same.
Let’s assume that the average salary (including benefits) of these 400 people is $31,250. That’s probably very low but I’m being overly cautious. Let’s also assume that these 400 people did no work whatsoever for the two days in question. That’s unfair, but the bias is taken care of by the previous downward assumption. Finally, let’s assume that each person is paid for working 5 days a week for 50 weeks/yr — that’s a full-time job (ignoring holidays) and assuming 2 weeks paid vacation. In other words, each person gets paid to do 250 days of work a year.
Those people are getting paid to <i>not</I> work when they are called for jury duty, so the total economic loss is $100,000 for the two days. The math, for those who are so inclined:
400 people * 2 days = 800 people-days
$31,250/person/year divided by 250 = $125 per person-day
800*$125 = $100,000
Assuming this happens weekly, the economic cost of entirely idle would-be jurors exceeds $5 million annually for New York City alone. In the greater scheme of things, it is not all that much, but there should be a way to dramatically reduce that number. The immediate idea? An email/phone blast which notifies an appropriate, randomly selected percentage (in this case, ~50%) of the 500-person pool the night before, informing them that they are excused from service for one year and need not appear — or at least a utilization of the call-in number provided on the summons to reach the same goal.
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Tags: law
