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Comment by SkittyDog | Hacker News Reader

Is there something in how Canadian or English courts work that would make it impossible to just delay jury selection for the pending trials, for a week or a month, or however long it takes to mail out the next round of jury summonses?

Because the way this story is telling it, I'm getting the impression that the court is simply prioritizing its own convenience over the needs of the people getting summonsed at the shopping mall, and then compelled to appear. Which seems like the dumbest possible way to implement a jury system, because it completely ignores the legitimate needs of the citizenry to attend to their own lives.

I don't particularly want to conclude that this particular court is poorly run, to the point of incompetence... So I'm really hoping there's more to this story.

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The procedure described in the article would not be legal in modern English courts. A court (probably) cannot hand out summons to people on the street. At least in England, the talesmen would have to voluntarily accept to serve on the jury, it is by invitation rather than compulsion. While courts historically did have the power to compel bystanders to serve against their will, that power has almost certainly lapsed.

Is there a legal basis for the jury duty selection process?

It is it just custom and the court can decide any procedure for selecting a jury pool from the population? And if so, random selection from the mall would be one such method...

Can't speak for Canada, but in the US, the jury process is a mix of black-letter law (explicit legislative acts) and administrative law (rules made by the court system under broad powers granted to it by legislation).

Tradition and precedent were the inspiration for a lot of modern law, but we explicitly re-implemented most of it via legislative and/or administrative law.

  > would have to voluntarily accept to serve on the jury, it is by invitation rather than compulsion

Jury service is compulsory in the UK.

"most people would decline a jury summons if it was voluntary, mainly for the inconvenience. Avoiding it, however, is ill advised: you cannot simply refuse and it is a criminal offence to not answer a jury summons without reasonable cause."

- https://www.law.ac.uk/resources/blog/everything-you-need-to-...

> the talesmen would have to voluntarily accept to serve on the jury, it is by invitation rather than compulsion

Of course you've remove an important qualification. Legally-speaking, you couldn't decline, but in practice since most judges recognise that a talesman is more inconvenienced than a regularly-summoned juror, it's effectively voluntary (and indeed you can decline, see this case in 2016: http://archive.today/2021.07.03-080147/https://www.thetimes....). If you were summoned normally, you haven't much of a choice.

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