Back before I went to law school, back before I was a trial lawyer who would die to serve on a jury in a criminal case so that I could experience first-hand the internal deliberations of a jury, I used to dread receiving a jury summons in the mail. And I sometimes wondered what would happen if I just failed to show up. Would they send a police officer out to arrest me and put me in jail? Not very civic minded I know, but nevertheless. That’s the way I felt.
The answer, in D.C. anyway, is that I would have run the risk of being held in contempt of court. The Washington Post, for example, reports that 100 bench warrants were issued in 2008 for District residents who failed to show up for jury service after receiving a summons.
The most egregious case involved a situation in which a guy, Louis Alexander, responded to the summons in January and was chosen for a jury but then cut out after the first day of a murder trial. On the second day he was supposed to report, Alexander apparently called the judge’s chambers to inform the court that he had an emergency meeting at the hotel he manages. Court personnel were unable to reach him on a cell phone number he had left, and the judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest charging him with contempt of court. Contempt of court carries a maximum sentence of up to 6 months in jail.
Yesterday Alexander appeared before the judge, D.C. Superior Court Judge Herbert B. Dixon, Jr., to answer for the contempt charges. Under questioning from his lawyer, Brandi Hardin, Alexander explained that his absence was due to an emotional breakdown. His father, now ill, had been a D.C. Superior Court judge. Being back in court evoked too many memories of accompanying his father to court when his father was young and healthy. Judge Dixon suggested that, while this explanation seemed a tad too convenient , he would accept it, and dropped the charges.