Kevbo

Probably, and that is likely something that you will have to declare before you're put on such a case.

trekbette

Yeahhhhhh, I wasn't called this week. Only one more week of being on-call to go.

villainess

I had jury duty yesterday. New York State Supreme Court. When we did the group oath, they had us "swear or affirm" and did not mention God at all.

the_villainess

Splat

If, as a non-believer, I play along with the oath and swear to it, I've already lied. Doesn't that free me up to ignore the rest of the oath? Doesn't it make me liable for perjury or something?

And what would happen if I were a witness and they asked if I swore to tell the truth...so help me god, and I was honest and said "No, I don't"?

Anybody still confused about why church and state should be kept seperate?

trekbette

I can't give an oath to be honest by responding to a lie. I just can't. I had to go in one last time yesterday and today and I was able to affirm instead of swear. It still didn't feel quite right as I was affirming to "under god" but that was better than nothing. At least they acknowledge that some people are different views.

I am thinking about writing a letter about my jury experience as a atheist. But who do I write it to? My Congresswomen? A judge? A newpaper editorial section?

DamagedGoods

How about all of them? Then you'll probably never get called on to serve again.

trillian

When you affirm, the words "swear" and "so help me God" are taken out and amended to "affirm" and "under penalty of perjury" (or something similar).

If they left in the "so help me God" part, they did it wrong!

You could write a letter to the judge of that court (after you look up their specific laws on oath verbage) and correct their mistake.

trillian

callmejay

When I was in the jury selection process (as a potential juror) the judge asked us a bunch of questions (as a group) which mostly could be summed up as: do you have any biases which would make you unable to be a fair juror? E.g. if you are an abused wife and a wife-beater is on trial, can you still be fair or do you think you'd be too biased? I don't know if being opposed to the law the defendant is being charged under would qualify as unfair bias or not, but it's possible the judge would let you decide whether you should be disqualified or not.

DamagedGoods

The last question our judge asked was if there was anything that would prevent us from being fair and impartial. I guess that was a catch-all just in case there was a particular bias they didn't think to ask about.

As far as being opposed to the law in question goes, I personally don't think I would consider it a bias in most cases, and if they didn't bother to ask that question, I probably would not volunteer my feelings about it. I'm sure there might be cases where I would have to admit that it might cause a bias, but for the most part I would prefer to be on a jury in a case where I thought a law was inappropriate.

DamagedGoods

Grrr...that happened to me on Monday. So I guess I'm off to look up some verbage.