Jury duty is done. I didn’t get on a trial. But I did get paid my $5. That’s right, $5. For a day of jury duty, I get paid less than minimum wage for one hour. Here’s the thing – if they paid me nothing, I would be content – I would have been doing my civic duty, and just as I don’t get paid for voting, I don’t expect to get paid for jury duty (unless I’m actually put on a jury). But if you pay me $5… well, that sends the signal that I’m too mercenary to do my civic duty unless I’m given a monetary reward. And moreover, my time isn’t all that valuable, since $5 isn’t all that much.
New Jersey, like most states, is in a fiscal crunch. If they cut jury pool stipends (jury pool stipends, not actual jury stipends – people actually spending weeks away from work need to be compensated for affordability reasons, and they get closer to $50 a day), the state could save at least $500 a day in my county alone ($125,000 a year), with 21 counties in NJ, that comes to a non-trivial $2.5 million a year. Not to mention the paper and postage (they send each of us a $5 check in the mail) the accountants and whatnot who actually do the work to send out the checks, etc.
Because I don’t expect NJ to actually listen to this advice, the next best thing would be to have the option to donate your $5 to charity. Yes, I realize that I could donate it to charity when I get the check. But its harder to do that once I’ve actually gotten the money, than to pledge money that I haven’t yet received (Mevyis et. al, in press). If I were an enterprising charity, I’d go to the courts and ask them to allow people to sign up to waive their $5 to the charity. Not everybody would sign the waiver, but many would. That could be $1 million a year in New Jersey alone. That’s a lot of money that could do a lot of good…
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