Our broken jury servitude system [View all]

[Lionel Mandrake]

Our jury servitude system provides an almost unlimited labor force which is forced to work for almost nothing. The court system wastes jurors' time in many ways: keeping jurors idle for hours in jury assembly rooms, sending hordes of them to courtrooms where they sit idly once again, waiting for the interminable voir dire process to exclude most of them, etc. The court system does all this because it has little incentive to use jurors' time efficiently.

An integral part of this economic distortion is excessive use of what are called peremptory challenges (defined below). We Americans pay little attention to how similar problems have been solved elsewhere in the world. Once when my time was being wasted in a jury assembly room and a judge came by to give the usual pep talk, I asked him what he thought about peremptory challenges. He said that of course he had his opinions but declined to say what they were. I mentioned that peremptory challenges had been abolished in England. The judge said that was interesting - he hadn't been aware of that. (!)

Today's LA Times has an editorial about peremptory challenges:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-peremptory-challenges-in-misdemeanor-trials-ab87-20150621-story.html