Jury Duty Kills the 13th Amendment

Well I got called for jury pool recently, the time when almost everyone dreads and squirms. When you look up just the simple word jury duty in Google you see millions of sights that tell you how to get out of it and how wrong it is and very few that are positive. Well, that's because it is the truth, there is something very wrong with it and it should be avoided and if the system stopped being so stubborn and switched to professional jurors then cheap archaic methods they wouldn't have the problems in the court rooms they have now with juries to no more hate sites or people trying to get out of being a juror. So I sent this letter off to the good old communist block of a jury pool office to settle the score and hope they stop stalking my ass. See what I mean, with professional jurors they wouldn't have to desperately stalk me, our judicial system has no pride now. Ill keep you guys posted as to how it goes. This letter is true, not a gimmick to get out of jury duty so I hope the truth sets me free. If not I gotta call my lawyers or an old acquaintance at the sheriffs office. I'm making a little pamphlet out of this material actually. Here we go guys, enjoy!:

To whom it may concern in the jury pool office,

Instead of wasting yours and my time with many excuses and waiting for the time of voir dire I felt I should write to you the open and honest truth now. If asked to take an oath to render a fair verdict on the case at hand I can't in good consciousness agree to this and will not be sworn in. I am oppose to being there due to my core beliefs and I believe that I am not qualified nor in good capacity to come to a fair verdict. I can not make a ruling from myself on a case in good confidence as an outside party to a case based on just the law itself and evidence presented. I believe that the jury should be held by professionals, the police or a higher power. Only can the police or a higher power be able to account for a case with better judgment and a first hand view as opposed to me or any other nonprofessional juror who would enter a case with only my personal experiences and biases. The neighborhood I have been hanging around in and now live in has a police substation with officers I and my family have become acquainted with. According to some of the events they have mentioned to have witnessed it proves to the point that they make a better verdict barer then I. I am in my own way exercising jury nullification, jury duty is currently a law I emphatically do not believe in and can not endorse. I do not feel comfortable and am not in good faith able to be a good juror for a court I especially have very little faith in. This may be a big and uncomfortable inconvenient truth for you but at least I am in the true meaning of voir dire "telling the truth", many in trial or in politics take the oath and have lied, at least here I am not lying.

I can not partake in a justice system that fails in proper sentencing to criminals due to the fact it takes in undereducated jurors that are not well versed in its laws along with a jury of peers that may at times come to a rushed but not good nor fair verdict to speedily return to their normal lives. I can not endorse a system that gives many leniencies for immigrant groups that so easily come and reside here and spread they're problems and make a legal mockery of us because our system is so welcoming to it. A system that lets the criminally insane or active career criminal easily walk free and protects them more then their victims or potential victims because its cheaper that way. I can not partake in a judicial system that supports the entrance of frivolous lawsuits into its court rooms wasting the court and its jurors time with things like the belief that large amounts of money can resurrect a dead loved one in an accidental death case or change a wrong into a sudden right for example.

Jury duty encourages welfare and is a crippler in our current economic times. A good example is I; my unemployment will be up soon so I really need to be adamantly looking for a good and stable job now. I do know that I could be hired into any job in weeks to come that could offer an income from between $20 - $30 and hour. I could even be making a decent wage working for a temp agency. Thanks to jury duty a person like me or anyone would be instead making a meager $27 a day and not in a good economically stable job. Jury duty is not only bad for our economy in way of how it inhibits citizens from making a good living but it is bad for our businesses as well. As employers scrape by with minimal employees now under their employ during these harsh economic times, jury duty takes from businesses the little bit of help they may have thus making the already dwindling quality of service businesses are putting out now to making service worst. Jury duty offenders also takes up jail space and budget that could be put into a real law offender, a criminal.

The jury pool system itself can not uphold its own rules. A jury is supposed to by law be randomly selected, I personally know people who have served on a number of juries and still today keep getting their names pulled over and over again. That is not at all random. Due to the fact of refusing the use of professional jurors our judicial system is beginning to become so desperate to fill its court rooms with jurors by breaking its own rules and letting anyone and everyone serve as a juror, for example a police officers spouse, a police officer himself to a cousin of someone on trial. I understand that jurors are pulled by unemployment lists, voter registration, and tax files and drivers license. The unemployed should be looking for work and trying to piece together a good living for themselves and their families, not locked away in some court room. People are beginning to not register to vote to avoid jury duty; this is terrible because we should be encouraging people to vote, not scaring them away. As for tax files, the only people who should pay to be punished is those who discretely choose to be so behind closed doors and on their own time. As for jury selection by drivers license, there are licensed drivers who are not only too young to be serving in a jury but there's a lot of licensed drivers here that should be put into a court room only to explain their terrible driving instead. I also do not believe in involuntary servitude for it is not only illegal and immoral but does not guarantee the best quality of service.

As a member of the American Panthers we believe in judicial reform and we take a firm stand that the present jury system is extremely wasteful and should be replaced by a well trained and dedicated group of professional jurors. Professional jurors can deter crime unlike the unprofessional system that seems easily compromised. We need professional jurors that are qualified, esteemed, trained, educated and thoroughly screened. Professional jurors can bring the end of rushed un-thorough juries or the end of hung juries due to jurors that lack needed education and understanding of legal terms used in a court room. Qualified jurors can be well versed in our laws and legal terms but also trained to read someone on the stand, like if they are being truthful by observation of ones speech and breathing patterns and body language. They can be well studied in the subjects of deception, detection and polygraph countermeasures. Professional jurors would alleviate the waste of days people spend making up stories or even truthfully begging or flat out dodging they're way out of jury duty. Professional jurors will be committed workers that will show up to they're jobs for it is their profession. We can alleviate the contamination of a lifetime of biases and unknown backgrounds a non-professional juror can bring into a courtroom that no jury pool day can dig deep enough to find. Professional jurors can shorten the jury selection and instruction process before each hearing and bring a higher jury attendance so we do not need to see another "Wayne County Wal Mart Jury Pool" again and also weed out people who should not be in a jury at all. Professional jurors will take pride in their work and can be trusted to make accurate verdicts because they are willing to go the length a case needs to be seen through with awareness of laws, legal terms and the training to see parties and lawyers as they are. A jury of professionals will mean no more "left overs". The switch to professional jurors can bring more full time well paid jobs into a currently depressed economy. As for funding for such positions, I'm sure a little more taxes to pay for such positions would not be disputed for people’s freedom. The cost for a professional jury will prove its worth in the end compared to underpaid amateurs.

As for who should be offered to be professional jurors and how? Jurors need to be people who are for example law school graduates or paralegals. Being a juror should be a profession with market wages and the liberty to enter and leave the occupation within mutual agreed contractual terms. Jurors would be thoroughly screened for prejudices, naivety, reasoning abilities, emotional state and intelligence. Jurors should report to supervisors who also have to answer to a superior and function as a government agency with rules and regulation to oversee checks and balances.

Unprofessional jurors can easily be swayed to the bullying of a strong willed juror on a panel or even other outside influences; this may mean they will not give the best and fairest of verdicts. Unprofessional jurors most of the time come into courtrooms with negative attitudes that may greatly affect a cases outcome. Unprofessional jurors also at times may lack the intelligence and common sense to be able to clearly make logical decisions without emotions taking over. Unprofessional jurors commonly come into the court room with the common negative biasness of resentment towards those on trial seeing them as troublemakers that everyone has to now drop everything in their lives for to give them their moment of glory in a court room. A lot of criminals on trial these days aren’t even citizens that I nor others want to serve for anyway. That does not sound like a positive jury ready to serve at their best in a court room. The only problem I can see happening with a switch to professional jurors is the possible switch to a more mechanical jury that will sacrifice the right of jury nullification which has helped in the past to bring such freedoms we appreciate today like peaceful protest.

As any important thing in life and ones country, a judicial system should be able to professionally serve its people. A person would not let any John Doe from off the street just perform heart surgery but would let a highly trained and educated doctor or well respected cardiologist do the surgery instead. We need this reasoning in our justice system. All this makes it hard to have faith in our current judicial system.

Our current judicial system does not uphold its own constitution. Jury duty hypocritically goes against our constitutional bill of rights and is a great blocker of our judicial systems service of justice. Jury duty blatantly goes against our Thirteenth Amendment which pertains to involuntary servitude and illegal slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment clearly states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall be permitted in the United States. Jury duty is involuntary servitude; it is a service that we do not volunteer for thus jury duty is indeed unconstitutional. Jury duty goes against its own countries labor laws. Upon excepting of employment for any job here one must sign a document stating that we are excepting employment at will and without threat. In jury duty we are not employed at will and we are under threat. Jury duty takes away ones pursuit of happiness and it is one of the biggest infringements of a citizens civil liberty rights now in the United States. With its low slavery wages that can't realistically sustain a household, we pay taxes to a system that has a judicial system that openly can not with hold its own laws, it defies it. This is scary and it makes for a poor example to its citizens and it breaks our reputation on an international level.

There is also the 6th Amendment that states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.” This means a citizen has the right to a faire trial by a faire jury, with in the district of where the crime or incident took place by witnesses and the right to an attorney. The 6th amendment does not state that a citizen has a right to a jury pulled together against its will at all. In fact it states an impartial jury which means a fair and unbiased jury, our current jury pool system goes against that part of the 6th amendment because the jury is unfairly forced to be there. Juries are put together by any stranger off the street told they have to be there, strangers which we do not know they’re level of fairness, life long biasness’s and bigotry nor background education and other experiences.

The 5th Amendment of the Constitution states that, “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This means that the 5th Amendment actually is against jury duty, its stating that no one should be forced to be part of a court case unless they were part of the situation in question. Jury duty forces outsiders of a court case to be a part of something that is none of their business and has nothing to do with them. Jury duty also goes against the 5th amendment by denying citizens the right to live they’re lives and they’re freedom to serve or not and it hinders our right to make a possible proper living to maintain our property.

The 7th Amendment states that, “In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.” This means that according to the 7th amendment in controversial cases where of great importance the right of a judicial trial shall remain by none other then the full extent of the law and judicial overseeing of the Court of the United States. In short the 7th amendment states that great cases deserve a fair trial with all checks and balances fairly weighed but it does not say whether the trial must contain randomly selected citizens off the street or professional jurors. Actually the switch to professional jurors would support the 7th Amendment because it would then guarantee more that a trial is thoroughly examined by its jury no other and no less.
As we can see here, the civic duty of non professional jurors are not only not clearly called for in our Constitution but it is actually against it. Our own judicial system for years has clearly discounted the very Constitution formed by our own founding forefathers and has reduced our Constitutional Bill of Rights to a bunch of kind little grandfatherly suggestions to now and then reminisce about. The Constitution was formed by the wisdoms of our forefathers that have seen or had personally lived through then escaped to America from such tyranny, they then created such a constitution to prevent such tyranny to ever exist here. Well, sadly their efforts has failed for present citizens and there is a tyranny and it exists in our judicial system and it is called JURY DUTY.

Jury duty may be an old tradition in our country, but if we never re-examined traditions for its positive and negative attributes we would all be wearing dead fish on our legs in hopes to ward off the plague and racial segregation would still be legal and a way of life in the United States. I believe that the tradition of jury duty is one that should be broken; it is making us as a country break from our constitution and morals.

Jury duty and the threat of noncompliance to it make a government look tarnished, hypocritical and tyrannical. It makes a government’s judicial system demoralize itself in front of its own citizens. While a judicial system should be there to service its citizens well and not oppress nor impede on them, jury duty shows this isn’t the case here. Jury duty shows that the system actually has no concern for its citizens and the safety and welfare of they’re family but is only concerned with the convenience of judges and lawyers. In other words the judicial system does not care about us. In that case why should we care about it? We have a judicial system that clearly wants us to take it seriously when it doesn’t take our structure and value of family seriously in turn. There is something terribly wrong here! The justice system ironically has the word just in it yet jury duty ,which is currently in our justice system, is not just at all but is actually legalized bullying. We are born in a country where each citizen is promised the protected rights of life, liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness yet we have such a law as jury duty that actually reneges those rights away. The best way for a government to have its justice system well supported and held in high esteem by its citizens is to uphold its own core laws or constitution, to listen to and take helpful notes from its citizens on common sense issues now and then and to be just itself in any kind of process of administering of its laws. For years our country, especially in its justice system has been failing at this.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not known by acquaintances to be a woman who always raises discourse nor do common displays of civil disobedience. I like to think of myself as a good, mild mannered person. I'm not a common soap box hopper with the exception for the occasional strongly worded rant of a blog article or real time speaking of my mind on current news and issues I feel strongly about. The issue of jury duty or anything to do with our legal system is indeed one of those occasions.

I had to write this letter to you to let you know my true thoughts, feeling and knowledge of this issue and its best I save yours and mine time by conveying this message now then later. I hope the facts and reasoning’s presented in this letter comes through to you clearly and helps shed some light of knowledge in anyway. Thank you for your time and patience.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Stevens