It is a good way to get out of jury duty...if you don't want to participate...but it's also a good way to keep the system in check and more people need to be made aware of it. Several of the laws we live by are considered unconstitutional...people are convicted based on adherence to "the letter of the law," without realizing the law allows them to "upset the apple cart," as it were, when deciding the fate of a defendant brought before them.
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I have already put one guy in prison, he totally deserved it, we were lucky that we had a lawyer on the jury with us.
All I can say about that is, the defendant should've fired the court appointed peon and hired a lawyer good enough at voir dire to excuse a lawyer called upon to serve jury duty.
Why did you say he has a court appointed lawyer? I didn't say that.
On what grounds would you exclude a lawyer from serving and to what end?
The guy was quite guilty and got the punishment he deserved.
I assumed a court-appointed attorney because they seldom have the motivation to carry out their duties when assigned by the court. I would exclude any and all lawyers from serving jury duty, for the same reason I would excuse judges, cops, etc., because their day-to-day duties create an obstacle of bias that one should safely assume would prevent them from passing an unbiased judgement. The Prosecutor also dropped the ball in this instance, as they should have used one of their rejections to excuse the lawyer from the jury pool.