Twelve apathetic men: why no wants to get convicted of jury duty.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Columns - Column

RECENTLY I SPENT the morning in a large room at San Francisco's Hall of Justice along with several hundred others watching Ideals Made Real, the world's least convincing infomercial. A 14-minute anesthetic that the state of California administers to anxious citizens to ease the pain of imminent empaneling, Ideals Made Real is filled with photogenic flags, close-ups of the Constitution, and candid disclosures from sedately enthusiastic jury duty survivors. "It's often a deep and moving experience to be on a jury," a robotic female narrator eventually concludes, and yet few in the audience seem sold on this premise. Young, old, rich, poor, as demographically diverse a cross-section of the public as the court system's computers can randomly generate, the great overwhelming bulk of them share the last common bond uniting America: They want to escape jury duty. Desperately. When a judge enters the room and asks those who aren't planning to plead hardship of one sort or another to stand up, only a couple dozen of us rise to our feet.

At a time when sentiments against government overreach animate the land, this ennui is, if not exactly puzzling, at least ironic. Trial by jury isn't merely a Hollywood plot device. It's a mechanism designed to prevent government oppression and to disperse the state's power into the hands of the common man. It's the ultimate embodiment of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Just one problem: The people don't seem all that interested in the job.

Earlier this year in Midland, Texas, for example, 601 out of the 750 people who were summoned to jury duty during a week in September didn't even bother to show up to the courthouse. "It's the most dramatic decline since I've been on the bench," 238th District Judge John Hyde told a local newspaper. That same month in the Virgin Islands, Superior Court Judge James Carroll 111 had to postpone jury selection because of poor compliance to summonses. "With 38 jurors, you cannot select a jury," he told a reporter. In Indiana, 10,000 people have ignored their jury duty summons since January 2011, prompting Judge Mark Stoner of the Marion Superior Court to start threatening jail time for those who fail to appear.

Jury apathy, or even antipathy, isn't a new phenomenon. In 1939, The New York Times reported that New York County was implementing a number of measures to "curb evasion of jury service." One ongoing factor, of course, is the economic burden jury...