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Jurors need pay, not lip service
EDITORIAL
The Missouri judicial system should stop the charade.
Paying jurors $6 a day – less than what most fast food places pay hourly – is an insult for each stressful day of service, which can last from eight to 12 hours.
Reimbursing jurors 6 cents a mile for driving back and forth across a county – mere pennies in this period of $3.50-per-gallon gas prices – adds insult to injury.
In addition to the slave-rate pay and mileage, jurors usually buy their own lunches. The cost erases even the daily pittance provided by the state.
Of course state legislators and judges would like to pay more, but there is no money to do so. Knowing the daily stipend will never be commensurate with the service required of people reduces the whole system of “paying” jurors to a pointless, Kafkaesque display of brain-dead bureaucratic thinking that is pathetically out of touch with reality.
The pay for jury service is so low that the state should just stop sending out checks.
Instead, the state should take those minuscule amounts jurors receive individually and put those dollars to work collectively. Doing so would produce of pool of millions of dollars. Such a pool could produce something of real public value.
Two definitions for “value” – out of the many that come to mind for this area alone – are more funding for state universities and further highway improvements.
Missouri’s Juror Appreciation Week occurs each April and this “holiday” came and went unnoticed, appropriately. Instead of just telling jurors how much they are appreciated, which comes off sounding like nothing more than sugar-coated lip-service, the state by next year should accomplish one of two things that would mean something to the people who serve on juries:
• Either pay jurors at least the minimum wage per hour when they are pressed, often against their will, into jury service; or
• Pay jurors nothing and instead put the collective value of those trifling checks to better use on behalf of Missouri taxpayers.
Either decision would pull “Juror Appreciation Week” out of a drooling pit of meaningless lip service and into the sunshine of meaningful action.
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The Missouri judicial system should stop the charade.
Paying jurors $6 a day – less than what most fast food places pay hourly – is an insult for each stressful day of service, which can last from eight to 12 hours.
Reimbursing jurors 6 cents a mile for driving back and forth across a county – mere pennies in this period of $3.50-per-gallon gas prices – adds insult to injury.
In addition to the slave-rate pay and mileage, jurors usually buy their own lunches. The cost erases even the daily pittance provided by the state.
Of course state legislators and judges would like to pay more, but there is no money to do so. Knowing the daily stipend will never be commensurate with the service required of people reduces the whole system of “paying” jurors to a pointless, Kafkaesque display of brain-dead bureaucratic thinking that is pathetically out of touch with reality.
The pay for jury service is so low that the state should just stop sending out checks.
Instead, the state should take those minuscule amounts jurors receive individually and put those dollars to work collectively. Doing so would produce of pool of millions of dollars. Such a pool could produce something of real public value.
Two definitions for “value” – out of the many that come to mind for this area alone – are more funding for state universities and further highway improvements.
Missouri’s Juror Appreciation Week occurs each April and this “holiday” came and went unnoticed, appropriately. Instead of just telling jurors how much they are appreciated, which comes off sounding like nothing more than sugar-coated lip-service, the state by next year should accomplish one of two things that would mean something to the people who serve on juries:
• Either pay jurors at least the minimum wage per hour when they are pressed, often against their will, into jury service; or
• Pay jurors nothing and instead put the collective value of those trifling checks to better use on behalf of Missouri taxpayers.
Either decision would pull “Juror Appreciation Week” out of a drooling pit of meaningless lip service and into the sunshine of meaningful action.