But people in the USA still are being drafted.
They are still being drafted into Jury Duty.
Granted, being on a jury isn't the same as being sent into military combat where you risk getting your limbs blown off!
But there is something sketchy about forcing people to be in a position to make life-altering decisions for someone else, and not only that, in high-profile cases, be forced in a position of being isolated for weeks and facing possible death threats due to an unpopular decision based only on the information the lawyers weren't able to get blocked from being exposed in trial.
Here's an article from the 1st Bill Cosby rape trial that ended with a Hung Jury. (Cosby has since been convicted and is awaiting sentencing)
Thomas MacMillan, “How the Psychological Toll of Isolation Might Be Affecting Bill Cosby Jurors,” The Cut, June 15, 2017,
A court will sometimes rent out an entire hotel floor to prevent jurors even from encountering other hotel guests. It can start to feel like a prison, said Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a law professor at the University of Dayton, who studies juries.“When is the last time you’ve been locked into a room for a day to work on a single problem and not allowed to leave?” said Andrew Ferguson a law professor and author of Why Jury Duty Matters. “We’re just not used to that.”Experts say that psychological effects of sequestration can often take a toll on deliberations, which can quickly get contentious, and jurors don’t get to go home at night and take a break from the day’s arguments. “You’re with these people all the time and some of them you might be disagreeing with and yet you’re seeing them for meals and there’s no escape,” said Nancy Marder, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Michael Knox, a juror who was removed from the Simpson trial, alluded to these difficulties when he told reporters that “personality conflicts” on the jury had come up. “The only problems the jury is having is problems any of us would have if they put us all in this house and sequestered us for any length of time,” he said.The pressure of sequestration can mean that jurors sometimes get aggressive, putting heightened pressure on holdouts when a majority has settled on a verdict, said Richard Klein, a law professor at Touro College. Yolanda Crawford, a juror on the O.J. Simpson trial, told the New YorkTimes that the monotony of sequestration may have led to speedy verdict in that case: “I think everybody was eager to come to a conclusion.”Another danger is that sequestration leads to a kind of “groupthink” where jurors stop thinking for themselves because they’ve spent so much time together, said Hoffmeister. Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in the Simpson trial, warned against this dynamic after the not-guilty verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, in which jurors were sequestered for more than two months.
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People tend to assume that trials are about the morality of the situation.
But actually, trials are about technicalities already determined by the restrictions by the law as it was written as well as the judge's orders.
Jurors are many times morally conflicted about allowing truly awful people go unpunished because the law forces jurors to focus on technicalities of the law instead of the morality of the whole situation.
An example would be the George Zimmerman trial. That was the trial in which amateur security guy George Zimmerman was acquited of murder and manslaughter charges related to the death of Trayvon Martin. Many activists felt that the acquittal meant the jurors approved of racial profiling and anti-black hate crimes. However, the jurors weren't allowed to take into account the morality of George Zimmerman's action in the pursuit of Trayvon Martin.
In this article, a juror described the pressure to focus on the technicalities instead of the morality of Zimmerman's situation.
Amy Zimmerman, “The George Zimmerman Juror Haunted by Trayvon Martin’s Death,” The Daily Beast, July 24, 2017,
Four years later, Maddy is still horrified by the tragedy of Martin’s death, but maintains that she had no choice but to adhere to the law as she understood it. It’s a point that comes up time and time again in The Jury Speaks—the painful chasm between a personal urge to administer justice, and a citizen’s responsibility to go by the letter of the law.
As Maddy tells The Daily Beast, “They give you this paper, and the five women were explaining it to me, saying, ‘This is the way it has to go’—you can’t look at the situation from where George Zimmerman was calling 911 and was chasing him or, you know, hovering over him—that’s not necessarily intent to hurt anybody. You have to look at it when Trayvon Martin was on top of him. Did he feel like his life was in danger? So you look at the rules they gave you, and you’re stuck in a box. You have no choice…it’s not emotional, it’s not what we want.” In other words, “The decision is made before we even get there.”
The same juror then mentioned that she recently moved to Florida before the trial began, so she was unaware of the case before being drafted on the jury
What Maddy and her fellow jurors did have in common was a shared ignorance of the Trayvon Martin shooting—before the trial, they were ostensibly unfamiliar with the details of the case, as well as the larger cultural significance of the shooting. Maddy explains that her lack of prior knowledge was equal parts preference and practicality. She was living in Chicago at the time, and “I never watched the news, because in Chicago, all you see in the news is the same things: gangs, shootouts, another person passing away. After a while the news got repetitive. Being a mom and working over 40 or 50 hours a week, I used to just come home, go to sleep, wake up, take care of my kids, and then get ready to go to work again.”
After months of forced isolation (that's what sequestered means), the same juror was totally unprepared for knowing how public the issue of George Zimmerman has become, and how much information was hidden from her during the trial.
Once Maddy and her fellow jurors, along with George Zimmerman, were free to go, Maddy began to experience a new kind of pain. “When I came out of deliberations, they put us in the car, and then I saw the helicopters,” Maddy recalls. “I’m coming home, and I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ And they explained it to me, they gave me a big red folder, and in the folder there were a bunch of different news channels that wanted to speak with me, and I was like, ‘About what?’ In my mind, I’m thinking that when you go to court, it’s private, not knowing that half of the people at that trial were news people.” She continues, “When I came out, when I got home, and I started watching the TV, I started panicking. I had no idea it was more about black and white, about racism…I realized how big it was.” In the months and years after the trial, Maddy “went through it all”— “losing my home, work, friends and some family.” She was harassed, threatened, and treated “like I was a contributor to Zimmerman killing.”“These tough words were very hard to handle,” Maddy says. “Again, I had no knowledge of how big the trial would be…we’re victims of the society that brings us into this situation. For three years of my life I had to feel like I’m carrying a child on my back.”
Forcing people to be on a jury in cases like this is psychological torture!
Forcing people to be on a jury in cases like this is a severe abuse of power by the government.
Telling people "you better come to judge someone's situation or else we will send armed government agents to physically drag you into jail" is exactly what jury duty is.
Why do we defend this?
Why can't we have professional jurors?
Why can't we have a "jury reserves" just like we have a military reserves, where people can voluntarily join in and wait to be called into service?
Why can't we have a system where people are being judged by people WHO WANT to have that responsibility?
Why can't we have a system where people are being judged by people WHO HAVE FULL UNDERSTANDING of the legal issues.
Some say "we need a jury of our peers". I want a jury of people who are morally and intellectually qualified, not people who are coerced into judging a situation they don't understand.
Look I get that some people want a "jury of our peers" so that a nonwhite defendant could at least have some people of his/her ethnicity judging his/her case instead of worrying about being convicted by an all-white jury. But we could still recruit nonwhite jurors willing to listen to cases with nonwhite defendants, instead of forcing people to judge a situation they don't want to get involved in.
I get that in some cases, having some females in the jury might be beneficial in sexual harassment & sexual abuse cases, being that female victims might worry that male jurors might underestimate the psychological vulnerabilities women experience as well as over-sympathize with the male defendant. But we could still recruit female jurors willing to listen to cases involving sexual harassment/abuse cases, instead of forcing people to judge a situation they don't want to get involved in.
I get that in some cases, having some females in the jury might be beneficial in sexual harassment & sexual abuse cases, being that female victims might worry that male jurors might underestimate the psychological vulnerabilities women experience as well as over-sympathize with the male defendant. But we could still recruit female jurors willing to listen to cases involving sexual harassment/abuse cases, instead of forcing people to judge a situation they don't want to get involved in.
We should also have a screening system so that we don't have people joining juries for the purpose of automatically convicting any nonwhite defendant or automatically acquiting frat boy date rapists. We have to have a checks & balances.
If the worry is "if we don't draft jurors, we will have a shortage, and trials will take forever to begin", then start paying Jurors more than chump change!
[note: Hawaii only pays $30 per day for jury duty. That's less than minimum wage]
If you want people to be willing to be in judgment in other people's lives, you have to make it at least something that can sustain a middle-class lifestyle!
Or make it an upper-middle-class wage that can afford private security and well-guarded residences if you're going to recruit someone willing to make decisions on high publicity cases!
If that means the government has to spend a little more on our judicial system, then so be it!
But we have to stop forcing people to judge other people's lives.
