Blog 12 "The Case of Jack Meridew"

The qualifications for being a jury is to be at least 18 years old, can understand English enough to understand and discuss the case. You must be a resident of the county; you haven’t served in a jury for at least 12 months because if you have the judge and also the lawyers might think that you know too much about cases and trials. Are currently not in any other court case or in any other jury the judge and lawyers think that if you are involved in a case like this were you have to make two different decisions they believe that you might make the wrong decisions for both cases, that you are not under a conservator ship, have had your civil rights restored if you were convicted of a felony or malfeasance while holding public office. Some basic details for being a juror, you get paid 15 dollars every day you come to the court case, every time you get paid 34 cents for every mile you take to get to the court house. You can only be excused from jury service only if you have a physical or mental impairment, serving would be an extreme financial burden or if you must take care of another person and there is no one else available to do it. Only then will you be selected to be excused from jury service. The jury is selected by first the judge giving the jurors a perjury admonishment. This in other words is an oath you must promise, if you do not answer the questions truthfully you can possibly go to jail for that. The juror duties during the trial you have to pay attention to the case going on and maybe take notes in your head or in your notepad, which you must bring on your own. Also you must give or be ready to give your decision of the trial, the rest of the juror’s must agree to your decision because you are making a decision in a criminal case and the vote must be unanimous. This means that the entire jury must be in agreement with you and if they aren’t they must convince you or you must convince them to agree with you. You must be ready to make a decision at the end of the case because if your decision is based for the community’s next rule/law maybe or even if to let the prosecutor leave and be free, or leave the prosecutor in jail for an amount of time. But well no stress on all the jurors out there because from what the video on jury preparation was most of the people that were interviewed they said it was probably the best experience of there life. They said that at first they were scared thought that it might be very hard and difficult, but the truth is that you just answer some questions truthfully and make sure that you have civil rights in the United States. No you do not need special training to be a part of the jury; you must just have honest answers and truthful responses to the questions. You can not do any other information out of the court case for the case. You cannot do any research on the case or tell anyone that you are part of the jury or that you were going to be a juror but got voted out, the lawyers ask you questions and if you don’t respond to one of the questions with truthfulness then they will be checking if you are asking yourself. The people that are asking these questions are the lawyers which just want honest responses, because they want honest and truthful jurors to serve in a real jury which would be in there court case. The judge also asks you if you know any of the people that are there, so if your do you must promise to give an honest answer/ response to the court case. You must not agree to the people that you know only because you know them you have to be honest and speak truthfully. They would not like you to tell anyone that you are part of this, because they think that people might influence a decision so that you don’t make your own decision on the case. Sometimes even when you are in a special case, you must remain in a hotel and have at least 2 guards in your outside door and you can’t go anywhere or do anything. You do go into a separate closed room to make your decision, the decision must be unanimous though and if it’s not you have to convince people to your side or you must agree with the other side.