Jury Duty & the Citizen's Role in Courts

Federal courts assemble jury pools under the Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, which requires random selection from a source list that reasonably reflects the district's population, in practice almost always voter registration rolls, sometimes supplemented with state driver's license or identification records to widen the pool beyond registered voters alone. This random-selection requirement directly replaced the older "key man" system, under which local jury commissioners hand-picked names they personally considered qualified, a system the U.S. Courts' own history of the Act describes as having enabled decades of systematic exclusion.

State court systems generally use a similar random-draw approach under their own statutes, though the specific source lists vary; many states also pull from tax rolls or state ID and utility-customer records to widen the pool further. Being a registered voter or a licensed driver in a district is, practically speaking, the main way a person's name lands in a jury wheel, which is why people who are neither sometimes go years without ever receiving a summons.

Each federal district's jury plan specifies its source lists and how often the master wheel is refilled, typically every two to four years after a federal election. From the master wheel the clerk draws a "qualified wheel" of people who returned an eligibility questionnaire and were found qualified, and summonses for specific trial weeks are drawn from that.

Relying mainly on voter rolls has a known side effect: groups that register at lower rates, including younger adults, lower-income residents, and some minority communities, appear less often in jury pools. About half the states now add driver's license or state ID lists, and a few add tax filers, specifically to broaden the pool.

Federal law sets baseline juror qualifications in 28 U.S.C. § 1865: a prospective juror must be a U.S. citizen at least 18 years old, must have lived in the judicial district for at least one year, must be able to read, write, speak, and understand English well enough to complete the juror qualification form, and must have no mental or physical condition that would prevent satisfactory jury service. A person is permanently disqualified from federal jury service while currently under felony indictment, or after a prior felony conviction for which civil rights have not been legally restored.

State eligibility statutes track these same basic categories, citizenship, age, residency, and no disqualifying felony record, but each state sets its own exact rules independently, so felony-disqualification standards and the process for restoring eligibility after a conviction vary considerably from state to state. Active-duty military status does not automatically disqualify someone from service, though a commanding officer can certify that a service member's absence would materially affect military readiness, a narrow exemption preserved from the original 1968 Act.

The English-literacy requirement is applied through the qualification questionnaire itself; courts provide interpreters for witnesses and parties but not, as a rule, for jurors, on the theory that a juror must directly understand testimony and instructions. New Mexico's constitution is a notable exception, barring disqualification of a juror for not speaking English and providing juror interpreters.

Felony disqualification is the single biggest categorical exclusion: studies estimate roughly 19 million Americans have a felony record, and in many states that record bars jury service permanently or until a formal restoration of rights. A few states impose no felony bar at all, while others restore eligibility automatically once a sentence is complete.

The 1968 Jury Selection and Service Act eliminated most of the broad occupational exemptions that had let entire professions, lawyers, clergy, teachers, and others, opt out of federal jury service automatically. Today, federal law recognizes only a narrow exempt group: active-duty members of the armed forces, members of a fire or police department, and certain public officers actively engaged in official duties. Almost every other request to avoid service is now handled individually as a case-by-case excuse or postponement, not a blanket exemption.

A court's chief judge or clerk can excuse or, more commonly, temporarily postpone a person's jury service on a showing of "undue hardship or extreme inconvenience," a standard that typically covers being a sole caregiver with no reasonably available child care, significant financial hardship from lost income, or a documented medical condition, using criteria each federal district publishes in its own jury plan. Deferral to a later date, rather than outright excusal, is the more common outcome, since it preserves the person in the jury pool rather than removing them from it entirely.

Before 1968, federal law let doctors, lawyers, dentists, ministers, and public officials skip jury duty automatically, and many states exempted teachers, nurses, sole proprietors, and parents of young children. The 1968 Act's near-total elimination of those categories was meant to make juries look more like the community.

Age is the main remaining categorical excuse: federal law and most states let people over 70 or 75 decline service on request, and many states excuse a primary caregiver for a young child or a disabled dependent. Full-time students are excused or deferred in many states, and breastfeeding mothers have an explicit excuse in a growing number of jurisdictions.

Voir dire, French for "to speak the truth," is the questioning process courts use to narrow a summoned jury pool, called a venire, down to the jurors who will actually hear a case. Depending on a court's local practice, a judge, the attorneys for each side, or both, question prospective jurors about potential biases, personal connections to the parties or witnesses, and life experiences that might affect their ability to judge the case fairly.

Two kinds of challenges can remove a prospective juror during voir dire: challenges for cause, which are unlimited in number and require an attorney to convince the judge a specific juror cannot be impartial, and peremptory challenges, a fixed, limited number of strikes each side may use without stating a reason, subject to the race- and gender-based limits described in the Rights & Duties tab. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 24 generally allows the defense 10 peremptory challenges and the prosecution 6 in a non-capital felony trial, with different totals set for capital cases and misdemeanors.

In federal court and many state courts the judge conducts most of the questioning, sometimes from questions the lawyers submit; in other states, notably parts of Texas and California, lawyers do extended questioning themselves, and jury selection in a major case can take days. Written juror questionnaires are common in high-publicity trials.

A challenge for cause succeeds when a juror admits or plainly shows an inability to be fair, a close relationship to a party, or a fixed opinion about the case, and there is no limit on the number. Peremptory strikes are capped (20 each in a federal capital case, 3 each in a federal misdemeanor) and, since Batson, cannot be based on race or gender.

Federal jurors are paid $50 for each day of service under 28 U.S.C. § 1871, a rate that increases to $60 per day once a trial juror has served more than 10 days on the same trial, plus mileage reimbursement for travel between home and the courthouse, according to the U.S. Courts' published juror fee schedule. State courts set their own jury pay independently, and many pay considerably less than the federal rate, in some states only a small per-day stipend.

Separately from pay, the Jury System Improvement Act of 1978 makes it illegal for an employer to fire, threaten, or coerce a permanent employee because of federal jury service, and every state has its own version of this job-protection guarantee for state court jury duty. Federal law does not, however, require an employer to keep paying an employee's regular salary during jury service, so whether a juror receives their normal pay on top of the modest court-paid fee depends entirely on the individual employer's policy or a union contract, not on federal law.

The federal $50 rate has not been raised in more than two decades; adjusted for inflation it would be roughly double that today. State jury pay ranges widely: a handful of states pay $40 to $50 a day, but many pay $10 to $25, and New Jersey and a few others pay $5 for the first several days.

Because court fees rarely cover lost wages, jury service falls hardest on hourly workers and the self-employed, and studies link low pay and no wage replacement to higher no-show rates and less economically diverse juries. A few jurisdictions have piloted "lengthy trial funds" that pay higher daily amounts for jurors serving on trials past a set number of days.

A federal jury summons is a court order, not a request. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1864, a court can require a no-show juror to appear and explain the failure, and a person who fails to appear without a valid excuse can be held in contempt of court and fined, though in practice most federal courts issue a warning letter or a follow-up order before escalating to a formal contempt proceeding.

State courts enforce jury summonses under their own separate penalty statutes, and how strictly those penalties are actually pursued varies widely by county and court, some jurisdictions actively pursue fines or bench warrants against repeat no-shows to protect a shrinking jury pool, while others rarely escalate past a second notice, a documented gap between the formal law on the books and typical day-to-day enforcement that court administrators around the country continue to grapple with.

Federal courts almost always send a "failure to appear" notice giving the person a chance to explain or reschedule before any sanction, and formal contempt findings against no-show jurors are rare. Some state counties send a show-cause order and can impose fines of $100 to $1,500 or, occasionally, a brief jail term, while others effectively do nothing.

Nationally, courts report "yield" problems: a large share of summonses are returned undeliverable or ignored, and appearance rates in many urban courts run well under half. Court administrators generally see better pay, shorter service terms, and easy online rescheduling as more effective than punishment for keeping the pool full.

A federal grand jury is an investigative body, not a trial jury. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(a) sets its size at 16 to 23 members, and its job is to review evidence a prosecutor presents and decide whether probable cause exists to formally charge someone with a federal felony, a decision called an indictment. Grand jury proceedings are one-sided: only the prosecutor presents evidence, no judge is present in the room, and the person under investigation has no right to testify or to have a defense attorney present.

A federal grand jury needs at least 12 of its members to agree, or "concur," before returning an indictment, known formally as a "true bill"; if fewer than 12 agree, the grand jury returns a "no bill," and the prosecutor cannot bring federal felony charges on that evidence without presenting new or additional evidence to a later grand jury, per the U.S. Courts' own description of federal grand jury procedure.

A grand jury sits for a set term, often 18 months for a regular federal grand jury and up to 36 months for a "special" grand jury investigating complex matters, meeting periodically rather than for a single case. It can subpoena witnesses and documents, and a witness who refuses without a valid privilege can be jailed for civil contempt until they comply or the term ends.

Because only the prosecution presents and the standard is merely probable cause, grand juries indict in the large majority of cases; the former New York judge Sol Wachtler's line that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich" is often quoted. Federal defendants can and often do waive indictment and be charged by "information" instead, usually as part of a plea agreement.

A petit jury, the ordinary "trial jury" most people picture when they hear the phrase jury duty, decides the actual outcome of a case, guilt or innocence in a criminal trial, or liability and damages in a civil trial, after hearing evidence and argument from both sides in open court with a judge presiding. "Petit," from the French word for "small," simply distinguishes this smaller trial jury from the larger grand jury and carries no implication about which is more important.

Federal criminal trial juries have 12 members under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 23, unless the parties agree in writing, with the court's approval, to a smaller number, and a federal criminal conviction requires a unanimous verdict. Federal civil trial juries can have between 6 and 12 members under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 48, and a federal civil verdict must also be unanimous unless the parties stipulate otherwise before trial.

The trial jury is the "finder of fact": it decides what happened, applies the law as the judge instructs, and, in a criminal case, must find each element proven "beyond a reasonable doubt." The judge decides questions of law and, in most states, sets the sentence after a guilty verdict, though juries decide death sentences under Ring v. Arizona (2002).

Alternate jurors are selected alongside the main panel and hear the whole trial in case a juror falls ill or is excused; they are dismissed before deliberations begin unless a substitution is needed. In a long or high-profile trial a court may seat four or more alternates.

The Fifth Amendment requires that no person be held to answer for "a capital, or otherwise infamous crime" without a grand jury indictment, but the Supreme Court held in Hurtado v. California (1884) that this specific requirement is not incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. States remain free to prosecute felonies without ever convening a grand jury, so long as the defendant receives an adequate alternative procedural safeguard, typically a judicial preliminary hearing to confirm probable cause exists.

As a result, roughly half of U.S. states still require a grand jury indictment for at least some categories of serious felony charges, while the other half let prosecutors file charges directly through a document called an "information," usually after a preliminary hearing before a judge, a split that has persisted with little change since Hurtado was decided in 1884.

Hurtado was one of the earliest cases refusing to "incorporate" a Bill of Rights guarantee against the states, decided decades before the Court began applying most of the first eight amendments to state governments. It has never been overruled, and the grand jury clause remains one of the few criminal-procedure protections that binds only federal court.

The states that keep grand juries for felonies are concentrated in the East and South; many Western states adopted the "information" system when they wrote their constitutions in the late 1800s as a Progressive-era efficiency reform. Even in information states, grand juries are often still used for public-corruption and organized-crime cases because of their subpoena power.

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) imposes strict secrecy on federal grand jury proceedings: grand jurors, prosecutors, court reporters, and interpreters present in the room are generally barred from disclosing what happened before the grand jury, including what evidence was presented and how individual jurors voted, with violations punishable as contempt of court. The rule exists to encourage witnesses to speak freely, protect the reputation of people investigated but never charged, prevent a target from fleeing or tampering with evidence, and shield grand jurors from outside pressure.

Witnesses who testify before a grand jury are a notable exception to this secrecy: a witness is generally free to publicly discuss their own testimony afterward if they choose to, since the secrecy obligation binds the people running the proceeding, not the witnesses who appear before it. Courts can, in the limited circumstances Rule 6(e) itself defines, authorize disclosure of grand jury material, for example to a later grand jury or in connection with a related judicial proceeding.

Rule 6(e) lists specific exceptions: disclosure to other federal prosecutors and investigators for their duties, to another grand jury, when "preliminarily to or in connection with a judicial proceeding," and, since 2001, to share foreign-intelligence or counterterrorism information. A court order is required for most of these.

High-profile fights over grand jury secrecy have included congressional requests for the Mueller investigation's grand jury material; courts have generally held that Congress is not automatically entitled to Rule 6(e) material and must fit an exception. The secrecy obligation is permanent, it does not lapse when the grand jury's term ends.

The Constitution's text never specifies an exact jury size, and the Supreme Court has allowed real variation as a result. In Williams v. Florida (1970), the Court upheld Florida's use of 6-member juries in non-capital state criminal trials, reasoning that the traditional number 12 was a historical accident of English common law rather than a constitutional requirement. In Ballew v. Georgia (1978), the Court drew a floor, unanimously holding that a 5-member jury is too small to reliably promote group deliberation and provide a fair possibility of a representative cross-section, making 6 the constitutional minimum.

Federal criminal trials still use 12-member juries as a matter of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 23, not constitutional command, while states remain free to use smaller 6-member juries for lesser offenses, a choice a number of states have made, particularly for misdemeanor trials, to reduce the burden of jury service and move court dockets more quickly.

Twelve became standard in England by the 14th century, and Blackstone's Commentaries, widely read by the framers, treated it as fixed. In Williams the Court called that number a "historical accident" and said the "essential feature" of a jury is group deliberation, community participation, and a chance at a representative cross-section, all of which a six-person jury could still provide.

About a third of states use six-person juries for at least some lesser offenses, and Florida uses them for non-capital felony trials, though its capital cases have always used 12 jurors (a 2016 change after Hurst v. Florida concerned how those jurors vote on a death sentence). In Burch v. Louisiana (1979) the Court held that a six-person criminal jury must be unanimous, no non-unanimous verdicts are allowed at the minimum size.

Criminal juries protect a defendant against the government's power to take away liberty, so criminal defendants have jury-trial and grand-jury rights the Constitution spells out directly in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. Civil juries, by contrast, resolve disputes between private parties, or between a private party and the government in a non-criminal matter, over money, property, or other claims, and their constitutional basis comes from the Seventh Amendment rather than the Fifth or Sixth.

The Seventh Amendment's civil jury guarantee is one of the few provisions of the Bill of Rights the Supreme Court has never incorporated against the states, so it directly binds only federal civil courts. Nearly every state constitution nonetheless includes its own separate guarantee of a civil jury trial, so the practical right to a civil jury exists almost everywhere in practice, even though it does not flow from the federal Seventh Amendment itself outside of federal court.

Only "serious" criminal charges trigger the federal jury right; under Baldwin v. New York (1970) an offense carrying six months or less can be tried without a jury, and "petty" offenses like many traffic and municipal-code violations are routinely decided by a judge. Once the potential sentence exceeds six months, the jury right attaches.

In practice, jury trials are rare: roughly 2 percent of federal criminal cases and a similar or smaller share of civil cases actually reach a jury, because most criminal cases end in plea bargains and most civil cases settle or are decided on motions, a trend scholars call the "vanishing jury trial."

The Sixth Amendment's guarantee of an "impartial jury" has been read by the Supreme Court to include a right to a jury pool drawn from a fair cross-section of the community, not a right to any particular jury's exact makeup. Duren v. Missouri (1979) set out a three-part test for proving a fair-cross-section violation: the excluded group must be a "distinctive" group in the community, its representation in jury pools must not be fair and reasonable relative to its share of the population, and the underrepresentation must result from systematic exclusion built into the selection process itself, not random chance.

This right belongs to the defendant, and by extension the community, not to any individual who wants to serve as a juror; a defendant cannot successfully challenge a conviction merely because their own trial jury happened to lack diversity, but must show the selection process systematically excludes a distinctive group over time, the standard applied when the Court struck down the systematic exclusion of women from jury pools in Taylor v. Louisiana (1975).

The cross-section requirement applies to the jury pool, not the final 12; a defendant has no right to any particular demographic mix on the seated jury. "Distinctive groups" recognized by courts include race, national origin, and gender; economic class, age, and religion have generally been held not to qualify.

Proving systematic exclusion usually requires statistical evidence across many jury pools, which defendants rarely have, so successful fair-cross-section challenges are uncommon. Where they succeed, the remedy is a new, properly drawn jury, not automatic acquittal.

Jury nullification occurs when a jury acquits a defendant despite evidence that would support a conviction, effectively declining to apply the law as written to the facts of the case, usually because jurors believe the law itself, or its application to this particular defendant, is unjust. The practice has deep American roots: the 1735 acquittal of publisher John Peter Zenger on seditious libel charges, covered in the Overview tab, is widely cited as an early example, and Northern juries occasionally refused to convict people charged under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 for helping enslaved people escape to freedom.

American courts generally do not tell jurors they have this power. Federal and most state courts have held that while a jury has the raw ability to nullify, since a "not guilty" verdict cannot be appealed or overturned by the prosecution, judges are not required to instruct jurors that nullification is a legitimate option, and some courts have removed jurors who tried to encourage fellow jurors to nullify during deliberations, an unresolved tension between the jury's practical power and its formal legal role.

The Supreme Court acknowledged the jury's power in Sparf v. United States (1895) but held 7-2 that judges need not tell juries about it and should instruct them to follow the law. Modern courts treat nullification as a byproduct of two firmer rules: a general acquittal need not be explained, and the Double Jeopardy Clause bars appealing or retrying an acquittal.

Historically, juries nullified in both directions: Northern juries refused to convict under the Fugitive Slave Act, but Southern juries also refused to convict white defendants for violence against Black citizens well into the 20th century. Courts today may dismiss a seated juror who tells others they will not follow the law.

Unlike a challenge for cause, which requires an attorney to give the judge a specific reason a particular juror cannot be impartial, a peremptory challenge historically let either side strike a limited number of prospective jurors for any reason, or no stated reason, at all, a discretion described briefly in the How Jury Duty Works tab.

That discretion is no longer unlimited. Batson v. Kentucky (1986) barred prosecutors from using peremptory strikes to remove jurors because of their race, Georgia v. McCollum (1992) extended the same rule to criminal defendants' own peremptory strikes, and J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B. (1994) extended it again to strikes based on gender. An attorney who suspects an improper strike can raise a "Batson challenge," triggering a three-step process: the challenger must show circumstances suggesting discrimination, the striking party must offer a race- or gender-neutral reason for the strike, and the trial judge must decide whether that stated reason is genuine or a pretext.

Before Batson, Swain v. Alabama (1965) had required a defendant to prove a prosecutor struck Black jurors "in case after case," a nearly impossible burden. Batson lowered it to a pattern in the defendant's own trial plus other suspicious circumstances, and Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete (1991) extended the rule to civil cases.

Critics say almost any neutral-sounding reason can be offered, so Batson challenges rarely succeed. Washington State's Court Rule 37 (2018) lets a judge deny a strike if "an objective observer could view race as a factor," without proof of intent, and Arizona in 2022 became the first state to abolish peremptory challenges entirely.

Federal criminal trials, and now, since 2020, all state criminal trials for serious offenses, require a unanimous jury verdict to convict, a rule the Legal Fights tab covers in detail. Deliberation itself is largely unstructured by law: jurors elect their own foreperson and discuss the evidence privately with no judge or attorneys present, taking as long as they need, though a judge can, in limited circumstances, give a supplemental instruction, sometimes called an "Allen charge," urging a deadlocked jury to keep working toward a verdict without abandoning any juror's honestly held views.

A jury that genuinely cannot reach unanimous agreement after extended deliberation is declared a "hung jury," resulting in a mistrial. The case is not automatically over, since prosecutors generally retain the option to retry it before a new jury, a decision that turns on the strength of the evidence, resource constraints, and prosecutorial discretion rather than any fixed legal rule.

The "Allen charge," from Allen v. United States (1896), asks minority jurors to reconsider their views in light of the majority's; many states have softened or banned it as coercive, and a judge cannot ask how the numerical split stands or which way it leans.

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 31 allows a partial verdict, guilty on some counts and deadlocked on others, and permits the court, on request, to poll each juror individually after a verdict is announced. If polling reveals a juror does not actually agree, the judge sends the jury back to deliberate or declares a mistrial.

Tampering with, threatening, or attempting to intimidate a juror is itself a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1503, and every state has an equivalent jury-tampering law. Courts also have inherent authority to seal a juror's name and address from the public record in a specific case when there is a genuine risk of intimidation or retaliation, a step taken periodically in cases involving organized crime, terrorism, or unusually intense media attention.

In rare, extreme cases, a federal court can empanel a fully "anonymous jury," withholding jurors' names even from the attorneys trying the case, a practice that traces to United States v. Barnes (1977), an organized-crime prosecution in New York where the trial judge concluded ordinary safeguards were insufficient to protect jurors from potential intimidation. Appellate courts have since required trial judges to make specific findings of a genuine risk before taking the unusual step of anonymizing a jury.

Jury tampering under 18 U.S.C. 1503 and 1504 covers threats, bribes, and even writing to a juror about a pending case, and carries up to 10 years, more if the case involves a violent crime. Retaliating against a juror for a verdict is a separate federal offense under 18 U.S.C. 1513.

When a court anonymizes a jury it must give a neutral explanation to the jurors, usually "to protect your privacy," so anonymity does not imply the defendant is dangerous. The practice has spread from organized-crime and terrorism cases to a growing number of other high-profile trials.

Sequestration, isolating a jury from outside contact, media coverage, and often even their own families for the length of a trial, is a discretionary tool a judge can order in cases likely to draw heavy publicity or where there is a specific risk jurors will be exposed to prejudicial outside information, not a routine or default practice. The large majority of American trials, criminal and civil, proceed without any sequestration at all.

Because sequestration is expensive, logistically demanding, and disruptive to jurors' lives, judges typically reserve it for a small number of genuinely high-profile cases and increasingly rely on narrower alternatives instead, such as specific instructions not to read or watch news coverage of the case and prohibitions on independent research, reflecting a broader shift in how courts try to protect jury impartiality without the blunt instrument of full isolation.

Sequestration was more common before the Supreme Court's Sheppard v. Maxwell (1966), which reversed a murder conviction because "massive, pervasive and prejudicial publicity" denied a fair trial and directed judges to control publicity by other means: continuances, change of venue, careful voir dire, and strict admonitions.

When sequestration is ordered, jurors stay in a hotel under supervision, with monitored phone calls, censored newspapers, and escorted family visits, for the length of the trial and deliberations. The O.J. Simpson jury in 1995 was sequestered for about 265 days, one of the longest in U.S. history.