Jury Duty

"Sitting downtown, in air-conditioning, judging people all day, with your lunches paid for? That's the life..."

— Stanley Hudson, The Office (US)

Exactly What It Says on the Tin: A given episode or story arc that involves one of the characters facing jury duty.

He may either look for ways to wriggle out of it, or do the civic thing and attend the trial. Or both, of course. If, in the course of the deliberation, he actually goes against consensus opinion on what the verdict should be, he may become a Rogue Juror. If played for comedy, the character may learn about jury sequestration and try to milk as much out of it by prolonging the jury deliberations. (In reality, jurors are rarely sequestered in hotels and when they are, they're usually the cheapest around. Government money and all that.)

If one of the jurors on jury duty has been bribed or is a ringer, it's Jury and Witness Tampering.

One part of jury duty that rarely makes it into fiction is that quite often more jury pools are summoned to court on a given day than there are actual jury trials that will be held. It's entirely possible for a person summoned to jury duty to just sit around in a waiting room for several hours (bring a book), at which point a bailiff tells them that they aren't needed and can go home now. It's also not uncommon to be selected for jury duty only to show up for day 1 of the trial and learn that there was a last minute plea agreement. Of course, being summoned for jury duty without even getting considered for being on an actual jury makes for a very dull and pointless story.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Parodied in a 2024 teaser for E.L.F. makeup's Super Bowl Special, summoning celebrities to "jury beauty" to deliberate over cases involving overspending on makeup.

Comic Books

• One of the American Splendor stories is about Harvey getting called in to jury duty. He gets out by just explaining his views about the criminal justice system, and how it would make him a terrible juror.
• An issue of The Batman Adventures involves Bruce Wayne getting jury duty - on a case he was personally involved in as Batman. When asked under oath if there's a reason he shouldn't be there, he outright says "I'm Batman." The judge doesn't buy it for a second.
• One story in The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist sees the Escapist (or rather his civilian identity Tom Mayflower) happily go in for jury duty because he sees it as another aspect of "crime fighting." He had a conflict of interest (having discovered the crime scene and turned the defendant into the police), but couldn't raise a complaint to that effect without giving his identity away. He tried to give the worst possible answers during the selection process only to be approved anyway. He ended up uncovering a conspiracy, perpetrated by the evil Iron Chain organization, to get the actually-innocent defendant put away.
• Obnoxio the Clown, a figure from Marvel Comics's Crazy, gets his own one-issue comic book (Obnoxio the Clown Vs. the X-Men). The back-up story has Obnoxio summoned for jury duty. He plans to use the money for it to buy cigars.
• Superman: In one issue, Clark Kent is on a jury and uses his X-Ray Vision as a Living Lie Detector to establish that the accused is innocent. It's actually someone else who's the Rogue Juror holdout, and Clark has to feed him the "Eureka!" Moment that establishes innocence without giving away how he knew it.

Film

• The Pauly Shore film Jury Duty - the foreman wanted it to go on as long as possible because he made a deal with the hotel staff to get a luxurious room, while the other jurors had to deal with lower-quality rooms, and in the meantime found the defendant was really innocent.
• Nicely subverted in Runaway Jury. The protagonist uses Obfuscating Stupidity and gives the judge all these trivial excuses not to serve as part of a Batman Gambit to make sure he is selected.
  "It was like poetry. The judge threatened to hang me."
• Subverted in Ernest Goes to Jail: Ernest is happy to find he's been called in for jury duty. Unfortunately for him, the defendant happens to be a henchman for imprisoned crime lord Felix Nash — who Ernest is a dead ringer for — and helps his boss hatch a plot to switch places with Ernest.
• The most obvious example, 12 Angry Men, about the deliberations of a jury in a murder trial. Later examples have a suspicious tendency to become a Whole-Plot Reference, especially if one person decides to be a Rogue Juror. (On the other hand, there's not very much you can do with a Jury Duty plot that wasn't already done extremely well here, so some resemblance is probably unavoidable.)
• 12 is a 2007 Russian remake of 12 Angry Men that doubles as a meditation on all the problems facing 20th century Russia.
• The jury duty is never actually shown, but in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! the eponymous character is shown stuffing the PO boxes of various residents of Whoville with traditionally unwanted bits of mail. Along with jury duty notices, he throws in blackmail letters, pink slips, junk mail, chain letters, and eviction notices.

Jokes

• An old one in the US: "In America you have the right to be tried by twelve people who couldn't get out of jury duty."
• Ambrose Bierce said that a jury was "twelve men tasked with deciding who has the better lawyer".
• To quote Jeff Foxworthy: "If you missed fifth grade graduation because you had jury duty...you might be a redneck."

Literature

• In the children's book Trial By Journal, the twelve-year-old protagonist ends up serving on a jury for a murder trial thanks to a new state law. It turns out that the supposed murder victim isn't dead, the defendant was framed, and one of the jurors is colluding with the real villain.
• The backdrop of Jury Duty, by mystery writer Laura Van Wormer. The trial is the original mystery, but it gets complicated when a fellow juror begins stalking one of the main characters.
• In one of Lawrence Block's Keller books, the eponymous Professional Killer finds himself selected for jury duty at the same time he's given an assignment in Baltimore, forcing him to do the job on the weekend. His handler lampshades the hypocrisy, or at least the irony, of Keller committing a murder on one day and then convicting a man for fencing a VCR on the next. Keller says that one's his job and the other's his duty. The target is dead and the fence went to jail, which just proves the System works.

Live-Action TV

• Our Miss Brooks: In "Trial by Jury" (a Sound-to-Screen Adaptation of "Traffic Court), Mr. Conklin is forced to cancel his fishing trip to attend jury duty. He is not pleased, as he relates to his daughter Harriet
  Mr. Conklin: I have been called for jury duty.
  Harriet: Can't you get out of it, Daddy?
  Mr. Conklin: Harriet, shirking one's civic duty is totally un-American. Jury duty, like voting, is an honour and a privilege. And a great American heritage. I've weaseled out of it twice already. I wouldn't have to be there at all today if it wasn't for a stubborn female who insisted on a jury trial for a traffic violation. She'll get a jury trial alright!
• Bull has the titular character getting jury duty. He rants as it's a waste of time since he owns a law consulting firm, he gets excused quickly. Turns out, this time he had to stay.
• A flashback episode of The Odd Couple (1970) featured future roommates Oscar and Felix meeting as fellow jurors in a parody of 12 Angry Men with Felix in the Fonda role. Interestingly Jack Klugman (Oscar) played one of Fonda's fellow "Angry Men" in the original movie (Jack Lemmon, who played Felix in the 1967 film version, went on to play the rogue in the 1997 12 Angry Men remake, in a further weird bit of synchronicity).
• An episode of The Burns and Allen Show features neighbor Blanche being called, with her husband Harry overjoyed at the free time he'll be getting while she's gone.
• Happened to Edith in All in the Family.
• Happens in an episode of Early Edition. Complicated by the fact that Gary kept trying to sneak out to prevent the tragedies in tomorrow's paper.
• The Monk episode "Mr. Monk Gets Jury Duty" is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  Monk: Don't get me wrong, I think it's the greatest legal system in the world. I just don't want to be a part of it.
  Natalie: Now, Mr. Monk, what if everybody felt that way?
  Monk: Everybody does.
• Was used as social commentary on Becker. Becker mentions to his assistant Linda that he always gets out of jury duty by explaining that he's a doctor and needs to be on call 24/7. Linda then complains to the government that her boss always manages to weasel out of jury duty, in a letter written on Becker's stationary. So both of them end up in jury duty. While the ditzy Linda manages to end up on several juries, Becker is repeatedly excluded because he's openly intelligent. His constant rejection leads to him getting so angry that he goes into a rant about how crap the criminal justice system is in America.
• Murder, She Wrote:
  • In one episode Jessica gets on a jury... and pulls a Perry Mason (freeing the accused by finding the real killer... who is also in the courtroom!)
  • In another, she manages to prove the accused is innocent because he was committing a completely different murder at the time.
• In one episode of Crossing Jordan, Jordan ends up in jury duty. She is the only juror who believes that the accused is innocent (due to her forensic experience) and ends up convincing the rest of the jury.
• Leverage: Parker (or rather, one of Parker's cover identities) gets called to jury duty and stumbles upon a plot by another group to mess with the proceedings.
• Newhart had Dick on jury duty, trying to get out in time to go to a basketball game.
• Ben is called up for this in one episode of My Family. It somehow manages to be worse than his naturally cynical outlook led him to predict it would be, due to a Lawful Stupid fellow juror named Joanna Elton Johns.
• Mac gets called up for jury duty on a murder case in the MacGyver (1985) episode "Rush to Judgement" and, naturally, can't resist investigating the case on his own — which is illegal, as the episode lampshades.
• 30 Rock:
  • Liz Lemon gets called for jury duty in Chicago and has to fly back to participate (she wanted to keep voting in a swing state, instead of New York). However, she has an ironclad method of getting excused: an old Princess Leia costume.
    Liz: I don't think it's fair for me to be on a jury, since I can read minds.
  • She tries this same trick in New York, and it fails spectacularly. It's not nearly weird enough.
• Veronica Mars is pretty upset that she has jury duty during her Christmas break. Once she's there though, a Rogue Juror votes guilty while Veronica and the rest want to acquit (inverting the usual formula. Veronica and the rest then sides with the rogue, thanks to Veronica's detective skills revealing the defendant's guilt in the episode "One Angry Veronica".
• Donna Moss was once tapped for Jury Duty in an episode of The West Wing. She spent most of the episode looking for ways to weasel out of it. At the end, Josh tells her that if she does weasel out of it, she loses all rights to complain about the O.J. verdict.
• Arthur gets called up for jury duty on an episode of Minder and ends up trying to emulate Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men with mixed results.
• Lois does jury duty in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle and ends up driving her fellow jurors nuts. She also projects the behavior of Francis onto the defendant and only realizes she's been botching deliberations at the end. Hal assumes she's involved in a recent murder case, and starts arguing the facts of the case with Abe, which leads to them physically acting out a hypothetical "murder".
• The Dead Zone has an episode where Johnny Smith is on a jury and uses his powers to figure out the truth behind the crime. He then has to convince the others in the jury of this. He also must use the evidence and not his powers to do this.
  • Worth noting that his initial vote for not guilty is not because his powers reveal the truth to him (they do later, once he examines the evidence). Rather, it's because he has a vision of the accused being murdered in prison, and he wants to be sure there's no reasonable doubt.
  • Also, some of the juries are aware of who he is and don't like the idea of a psychic using visions to determine guilt rather than the facts of the case. The judge, though, is more than willing to give him some leeway. He even jokes occasionally, asking the jury for a verdict when they're clearly still deliberating, When everyone gives him odd looks, he clarifies he was asking whether they wanted Thai or Italian for dinner.
• The Dick Van Dyke Show: In "One Angry Man", Rob receives a notice calling him for jury duty at the beginning of the episode. Laura initially suspects he wants to do it more as an escape from work and a desire to be a lawyer than out of duty. However, she doesn't mind until she finds out that the defendant is an attractive woman. She tells Rob that he's biased and should quit.
• Designing Women: Julia Sugarbaker's extended, sequestered jury duty causes her to miss dining with Jimmy Carter.
• In one episode of Charmed (1998), Phoebe serves on a jury and has a premonition telling her that the defendant is innocent. The episode consists of her trying to keep the jury from convicting while her sisters hunt down the real killer (the fact that she could keep deliberations going indefinitely by just refusing to vote to convict apparently doesn't occur to her). The jury are on the verge of declaring a hung jury when Phoebe indicates that she won't vote to convict — then, when she starts talking about magic, the other jurors threaten to simply tell the judge that she's insane so they can call in an alternate juror rather than declare a hung jury.
• In The Office (US), Toby mentions having served on the jury for the Scranton Strangler (later admitting that they may have convicted the wrong guy), and in a later episode, Jim returns from a two-week jury duty break (which he later admits to milking for a break from work after being sent home on the first day).
• In one episode of That Girl, Marlo Thomas is on a jury and turns everyone around to get the defendant acquitted. Her proof is that the guy was right-handed, but was accused of hitting his wife on the right side of her face. A right-handed man, she says, would hit someone on the left side of her face. After the acquittal, the defendant and his wife get into a screaming match, and he picks up an ashtray and hits her backhanded to the right side of her face, showing that he really did do it.
• JAG:
  • Bud Roberts in "Odd Man Out" (season 7), despite being friends and coworkers with both Government lawyer Mac and Defense Consul Rabb. He ends up pointing out the reasonable doubt to the other jurors. Turns out the guy was actually guilty. Even Harm wanted him put away.
  • Jennifer Coates in "The Sixth Juror" (season 10) because they had exhausted all other possible people for said duty at the small base where the trial was held. She ends up showing that one other juror was actually having an improper relationship with a witness in the case.
• Jez of Peep Show is called to jury service and gets to chatting to the defendant in the court canteen. They start having an affair, and he learns that while she didn't do what she's accused of this time, she has done it several times before. He convinces the other jurors to convict her partly for this, and partly because she scares him and he doesn't want to have to dump her. (It's something of an inversion of 12 Angry Men, since before he met her he was convinced she was innocent not from any evidence, but just his general contrariness and anti-establishment sentiment.)
• A sequestered juror on CSI dropped dead during the deliberation phase of a trial, and all the other jurors became suspects because he'd been the only holdout preventing them from reaching a guilty verdict and getting back to their own lives.
• An episode of The Nanny had Fran sitting on the Jury of a case that mirrors her Will They or Won't They? relationship with Mr. Sheffield (a man who said he loved a woman then took it back), and she gets inappropriately emotionally invested.
• Hancock's Half Hour did an episode based on 12 Angry Men, with Hancock and James both on the same jury and each holding up proceedings for different reasons - Hancock because he can't decide on his verdict, and James because the jury are getting put up in a nice hotel for free and he wants to milk it for as long as possible.
• Fonzie and Mr. Cunningham served on a jury on Happy Days where a black gentleman who rode a motorcycle was accused of stealing a woman's purse and riding off, holding the purse up in his left hand. The rest of the jury (including Mr. C) was convinced of the man's guilt until Fonzie read the court documents that he had been riding a motorcycle made in England. He tells the other jurors that the man couldn't have stolen the purse, since that particular bike's accelerator is on the left handlebar. One of the other jurors clearly didn't want to acquit him until Fonzie pointed out that the man can't be convicted for Riding while Black.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry gets jury duty and is perfectly happy pretending to be a racist in front of a room full of people in order to get challenged.
  Larry: I don't know if I could be impartial, Mr. Conden, given that the defendant is a Negro. [cue Death Glares]
• In one episode of Bones, Brennan serves on a jury and convinces her fellow jurors to acquit the defendant. Meanwhile the gang at the lab investigate a separate murder which essentially proves that the defendant is guilty, but can't tell Brennan because rules of jurisprudence forbid anyone from talking about the trial with her until after it's over.
• Cheers: In "Never Love a Goalie, Part 2", Diane serves on a jury and is desperate to talk about the case with the folks at the bar even though it's not allowed. In the jury room she irritates the hell out of her fellow jurors.
• Person of Interest: In "Guilty", Harold Finch finds himself called up for jury duty under his Secret Identity name. He tries to get out of it by saying he has a problem with the government as a whole: it's not really 'for the people' when there's an intelligent supercomputer trying to take over the world. Unfortunately, The Machine needs Harold on that jury to protect the life of another juror and ensure that an innocent man isn't convicted, so it arranges for the man placed ahead of him on the list to be disqualified by making his phone ring during selection, after changing his ringtone to MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This".
• One Anvilicious episode of 7th Heaven has Lucy called up for jury duty, reacting like most people would while her husband chastises her for not wanting to drop everything for this. The defendant turns out to be her ex-boyfriend, and she's excused on account of this. She has kind of a freakout begging for a chance to serve on a different jury.
• In one episode of Grimm, Rosalee is on a jury and discovers that the attorney is a wesen whose power is to produce pheromones to manipulate people's emotions. She of course can't tell the judge (he'd think she was crazy and declare a mistrial), so she and the guys come up with a Zany Scheme to slip him a potion that will neutralize his power.
• In one episode of Modern Family, Gloria is excited to serve on a jury for the first time as a symbol of her new citizenship, only to be rejected after showing an over-dramatic willingness to point out a perpetrator (with the judge telling her she can stop acting crazy when she pleads to be able to serve, saying she got out of it).
• One episode of Blue Bloods sees Danny Reagan catching a case due to jury duty. His detective's eye makes it impossible for him to convict the accused during deliberation based on what he observes in the crime scene photos, causing a mistrial due to a hung jury. When he gets back to the precinct, his CO hands him the case files for the murder case he was deliberating because the investigating detective was annoyed that he questioned the validity of the investigation as a jury member and tells him to investigate it himself if he's so sure that the case was handled improperly.
• One episode of The Good Wife is told from the viewpoints of a deliberating jury with flashbacks to the court proceedings involving the main characters. Eventually, the jury comes up with a Not Guilty verdict only to be told by the judge that a plea deal has been reached, meaning the defendant they would have otherwise gone free will now spend years in jail. In another episode, Alicia gets jury duty, but gets out of it pretty quickly by telling the judge that she's a lawyer (no one wants a lawyer on the jury).
• Kingdom Hospital: Hospital maintenance man Jonathan B. Goode is never seen until the last episode, with assorted reasons for not showing up. In episode 7, it's because he's been called for jury duty - then there's a cut to the courtroom where they're calling up members of the jury pool, and Mr. Goode is also a no-show. When Dr. Stegman finally meets him and asks him about it in the finale, he explains it as "Took care of it. Knew a guy."
• Claire Greene was a Rogue Juror in an episode of Promised Land, wanting to acquit a young woman charged with criminally negligent homicide (her son had wandered out into the street while she was asleep and been hit by a car). With every argument she made, she managed to convince other jurors of the woman's innocence. Unusually for this trope, she turned out to be wrong—only after the trial did she learn that the woman had been arrested for child endangerment three times prior to this incident and that contrary to the image she'd presented in court, she'd returned to the irresponsible behavior that led to her son's death and was now jeopardizing her daughter.
• In Reba, Barbara Jean is called to jury duty and feels it's an honor and privilege to serve. She treats her role with all the seriousness she can muster (which, admittedly, isn't much) until she's thrown off the jury for annoying the judge too much.
• To accommodate for Zooey Deschanel's maternity leave on New Girl, her character Jess shows up for jury duty, gets into shenanigans at the courtoom, and is promptly sequestered away for a few months due to the trial being very high-profile.
• The Not Going Out episode "Jury" is a Bottle Episode set entirely in the room where Lee and the other members of the jury he's on are deliberating. The case itself is an open-and-shut one; Lee just prolongs the deliberations in an attempt to find out which of the other jurors scratched his car.

Newspaper Comics

• Dilbert had a brief arc with him on Jury Duty, the more memorable strip has a man excused because his religion forbids judging other people.
  Other guy: Oh, I think I'm that religion too!
  Religious person: [Thinking] What an idiot!
  • Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, once wrote about his own experience on a jury. He was the only juror who thought there was even a chance (though a very small one) that the guy was innocent of the many crimes he was accused of, but decided not to speak up because he was hungry and didn't want to drag the deliberation out. He ends the segment by apologizing to the defendant: "I'm sorry I basically sent you to jail for the rest of your life so I could get a Snickers."
  • Another Dilbert strip had a co-worker asking him what excuse he was planning to use to get out of jury duty. When he says that he intends to serve, the co-worker says, "Insanity. That's a good one."
• In The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy gets called for jury duty and eagerly anticipates the easy money, but his roommates warn him that potential jurors are sometimes dismissed based on their looks - so he slicks down his hair and puts on a suit to look super-straight...and the freak defense attorney dismisses him over his looks.
• Clive gets jury duty in an arc in the Alex strip and ends up teaching his fellow juror how to fiddle their expense claims.
• Get Fuzzy has several comics in which Rob is called on for this. While his actual serving on the jury isn't shown, there is his registration where, upon reflection about how stressful his home life is, he admits to the very concerned woman at the table that being picked for jury duty would actually be pretty relaxing.

Radio

• The Ellery Queen radio show had an episode where Ellery and his secretary Nikki both ended up on the same jury, and Ellery ended up solving the case and revealing the true killer who was also in the courtroom (similar to the Murder, She Wrote example but predating it by decades).
  • Ironically enough, the people who made Murder She Wrote, worked on the Ellery Queen TV show.
• An Adventures in Odyssey episode has Eugene and Bernard get called up for this. The episode involves Eugene being very thorough asking for a transcript of the trial and going through the details meticulously, much to the annoyance of the other jurors. Since everyone else is all set to give a guilty verdict, this turns him into a Rogue Juror by default.
  • The twist of the episode is that, naturally, Eugene is right, the defendant isn't guilty. Through examination of the evidence and testimony, he manages to also convince 10 of the other 11 jurors of this fact, and the jury is disqualified when the last advocate of a guilty verdict is discovered to have a pre-existing grudge against the defendant.
• On an episode of The News Quiz, discussing plans to make it harder for middle class people to get out of jury duty, which studies had found they disproportionately did, Alan Coren described his own experiences on a jury:
  Alan Coren: It was marvellous. Me and eleven other people with nothing better to do with an afternoon. We heard seven cases, and in every one they said "That's not a crime, everyone does that". Get doctors and lawyers involved and they'll be bringing back hanging for scrumping apples.

Webcomics

• This story arc of Full Frontal Nerdity.
• Ozy and Millie had a satire of jury selection with the smart, but eccentric Llewellyn making remarks about he's not against unusual punishment per se, and getting dismissed for knowing law.

Web Originals

• Boston Jury Duty, a skit about several Red Sox fans trying to avoid jury duty that clashes with a game.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • Homer in "The Boy Who Knew Too Much". He stalls the verdict in order to keep staying in the hotel where the jurors are sequestered, unknowingly giving Bart time to agonize over whether or not he should admit he skipped school and saw the alleged "crime".
    Lisa: I'm sure he'll be found innocent by an impartial jury.
    [cut]
    Homer: Jury duty? I'll see that Quimby kid hanged for this!
    Lisa: I knew it was a mistake to watch him open the mail.
  • When Apu becomes an American citizen in "Much Apu About Nothing", one thing in his mail is a jury duty summons. He says that now he is truly an American, and tosses it in the trash (ironically, he was on the jury with Homer in the earlier episode).
  • Homer gives tips to Bart on how to avoid jury duty: "Just say you're prejudiced against all races."
  • Fat Tony (the one who used to be Fit Tony) was once a juror and had an accountant head his "legitimate business" for him.
• An episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law has him get selected for the jury of a trial he is also the defense lawyer for. Judge Mentok solves this dilemma by using Elliott the Deadly Duplicator's ray to make a copy of Birdman, so one can sit on the jury. He learns that the other jurors don't think very much of his defense style.
  • This is clearly a case of the Rule of Funny, because in a real court of law, being a lawyer already involved in a court case is a perfectly valid excuse to get out of jury duty.
  • There's also the issue of Birdman's duplicate still technically being him, in a sense, and can't really be called an impartial juror. But again, Rule of Funny.
• Family Guy:
  • In a Cutaway Gag from a season 4 episode, Peter pretends to be racist to avoid jury duty by stating (to the all-white jury) "Awful lot of Honkies in here."
  • Peter in "April in Quahog" during the first plot. He's excited at being selected for the first time, thinking he's special, before realizing that everyone does jury duty at some point. He attempts to get kicked out of jury.
  • "12 and a Half Angry Men" is a straightforward 12 Angry Men parody, with Brian taking the Henry Fonda role and making the jury reenact an orgy.
• Pepper Ann had one where the mom had jury duty, and it quickly became a parody of 12 Angry Men.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: The episode "Keeper of the Reaper" is about a trial to decide who gets to keep Grim due to Billy's family moving, but a lot of time is given to one of the jurors, an eccentric demon named Fred Fredburger.
• Stan Smith in the American Dad! episode "The People vs. Martin Sugar". He is always eager to attend jury duty every year as he sees it as one of the duties of a true American, even renting out a hotel room during the trial to make sure he stays impartial. It turns out the defendant is one of Roger's personas who attempts to charm the entire courtroom, with no effect on Stan.
• Dan Vs. has this as the name of the episode, in which the title character must do hard time and attempts to exonerate a defendant in trial from a crime the latter didn't commit. it works, but also exposes Dan for the crime, which gets Dan arrested instead.
• Phineas and Ferb: In "Norm Unleashed", Doofenshmirtz was called to be a juror. He expected to be let out of it by admitting he's an Evil Scientist ("Evil", not "Mad") but the judge decided having one as a juror would be useful as the defendant was another one. Dr. Diminutive was to be put on trial for the damages he caused by using the Schmaltz-inator he "borrowed" (read: stole) from Doofenshmirtz. Doof, despite wanting out of jury duty, denied being acquainted to Diminutive. Both of them started arguing and ended up in prison.
  • In that same episode, another juror, when asked to state his occupation, claimed to be "between jobs". Doof thought he said that to get out of jury duty and that it wouldn't work. He did get out of it but he ironically wanted to be a juror so he could add that to his resume.
  • In another episode, Major Monogram got jury duty. When he was about to state the verdict, he was hit by an inator that makes people say double negatives, causing the defendant to be declared "not not guilty" instead of "not guilty".
• Batman Beyond: When Mad Stan blew up the City Hall (in a virtual reality simulator owned by Spellbinder) one of the things he expected from this was "no more jury duty".
• In one episode of The Flintstones, Fred and Barney have jury duty (Which should not be possible - Jurors are not supposed to know each other or anyone associated with the case they're trying to avoid undue influence, so one of them should not have been on it) with Fred as the jury foreman. Despite the evidence, Fred was the only one who thought the defendant was innocent, but after the other jurors (including Barney) ganged up on him, he submitted to 'Guilty'...only for the defendant to vow revenge on Fred (and Fred alone) because he was the jury foreman.
• The Johnny Bravo episode "One Angry Bravo" had him picked for jury duty over a parking ticket ^note Obviously Artistic License – Law. You don't get a jury for a parking ticket. Because the defendant was a hot babe, he stalled the trial for eight months and refused to convict until the judge finally stripped the sequestered jurors of some privilege, after which he promptly convicted her of the offense. The defendant got an $80 fine, but Johnny's behavior in court finally got him sent to jail.

Real Life

• In his latest Evening With DVD, Kevin Smith tells a hilarious story about serving jury duty while suffering from a rather painful anal lesion.
• Jeremy Clarkson relates an anecdote about serving on a jury where he remembers two notable characters: The first was a snobbish Stepford Suburbia type who said "He's clearly guilty - he has a beard and everything." The second was a black woman who said she couldn't find a fellow black person guilty of anything (she was the only one to vote "not guilty"). These instances have given him a notable hatred of the jury system, saying that if he ever commits a crime, he doesn't want to be judged by "a bunch of idiots from McDonald's and Kwik-Fit."
• In Virginia, a seldom noticed part of the law makes it trivially easy to get out of jury duty. § 8.01-339 of the Code of Virginia says "No person shall be eligible to serve on any jury when he, or any person for him, solicits or requests a jury commissioner to place his name in a jury box or in any way designate such person as a juror." So all it takes in the Commonwealth of Virginia to get removed from the jury pool is to write a letter to your county's Jury Commissioner requesting to be put on the list, which then means, by law, they would have to strike your name and remove it from consideration.
• In a radio interview, Alex Trebek recounted how he received a jury duty summons two weeks after becoming a naturalized American citizen.

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