Failure to Respond to Jury Summons

I had just started taking pre reqs last year and received my summons for jury duty. I tried to get out of it but here in LA if you are not in school full time, they will not exempt you. However, as a full time nursing school student, they would have excused me. You may want to make the call to verify. Good luck.

You should have responded when you received the 1st notice. There is a process for requesting to b e excused. I was called twice in October and just requested to be excused due to being in nursing school and was each time with no problem. Sounds like you failed to respond at all and that is a big no no! Good luck getting this straightened out. I bet it takes more time than requesting an excuse to begin with. Just follow your instructions to the letter this time.

Clinical/lecture/lab is not a valid reason to miss jury duty. Once you have served in any type of civic duty position, you will understand why jury duty is required.

Think about it this way: If, due to unfortunate circumstance, you are wrongfully accused of a crime.....would you want a jury of your peers, or a jury of whoever wasn't busy that day?

Respectfully, if all you have to do is reschedule or cancel job interviews, you'll have gotten off lightly. Ignoring a summons to jury duty is punishable in many if not most states by criminal charges and jail time. If I were you, I'd call authorities immediately to find out what you can do to mitigate the circumstances.

I'm surprised to read that another poster was released because s/he was in nursing school. That wouldn't fly in my neck of the woods. Years ago my father was self-employed, explained that to the judge -- and was promptly impaneled on a jury for six weeks. Civic duty is just that.

Doing your civic duty doesn't mean you have to bankrupt yourself.

In Arizona (Maricopa County) there is a check box that says serving jury duty would affect your means to earn a living. Being self employed would fit that to a T. All you would need to write a letter of explanation to accompany that reply form.

"All you would need to write a letter of explanation to accompany that reply form. "

It can be as easy as that to excuse yourself from jury duty with a valid response. But failing to respond to a summons will be taken quite seriously. As it should be.

In Indiana, they don't really care either, at least not in my part.....got called while in nursing school full time. Judge didn't really care. I got out of it when the offender plead just before opening arguments. And yes, you can be jailed and or fined for missing. I hope this doesn't reflect negatively on your record. Just take it as a lesson learned and hopefully not repeated.

Arizona law does not say you may be excused if you're self-employed. It says you may be excused if service will make it difficult for you to pay your daily living expenses. That's completely different; otherwise, the self-employed who are well-off would never serve. As the Maricopa County jury page notes, there is no single excuse to get out of jury duty in Arizona except being age 75 or older.