Knock on the door. Sheriff’s Deputy looking for my wife, who passed away a year ago this coming Friday.
Is Mrs. … home?
No.
Do you know where she is?
Yes, Myrtle Beach SC.
When will she be back?
She won’t, she is interned there. Do you want to see the death certificate? I can go get it out of the safe.
Long silence, then he tells me that he has a bench warrant for her arrest for ignoring a jury duty summons. I’m in shock. I know they can do that, but I have never heard of it actually happening. I got the jury summons for in January. I wrote “Deceased as of 11/7/2024 - RTV” on the envelope and sent it back. Apparently that is not good enough, but the deputy couldn’t tell me what was good enough. He just walked away and got in his car.
Unfortunately, the way things are going right now in this wonderful country, I’m kinda surprised the he didn’t just arrest you, while he had you at the door.
Apparently, some of our law enforcement is operating with arrest quotas hanging over their heads. Innocence or guilt be damned.
I am thinking she got on the list and then they never took her off. Maybe they don’t update these lists even if the source material gets updated? I have been summoned for jury four times but fill out my job on form and send it back and they excuse me.
i think more the issue to what the OP is commenting on, is that the county actually took the step to issue a warrant and go to the extent of arresting someone for ignoring a jury request. I’m surprised at this also. I know they can, but have never heard of it actually happening. I just figured the judicial and law enforcement folks had better things to do than actually haul someone to jail for this which is costly and time consuming.
I mean they could even still issue a warrant (or something equivalent as I don’t know if all warrants have to be actually served and actioned) and get it on your record, but actually going to serve it and arrest to throw in jail is a larger escalation step.
Sending a jury summons to someone who died within the past two months — it’s understandable that they were slow to update their rolls.
Failing to follow-up someone whose envelope was returned as deceased — either checking official records or contacting the sender — I can understand that. Maybe lots of people write “deceased” in hopes of getting out of jury duty. I don’t know.
But issuing a bench warrant for someone’s arrest? I can see doing that for a serial offender. But for a possible one-time offender and not even running a Google search and checking county rolls to see if the person is alive and resident in the County? That seems both heavy handed and highly inefficient.
My impression/assumption is, specifically in public sector - the paid non-workers are visible, and when they are, it is maddening. Plenty of cosplaying non workers in the private sector, but - not my circus ,etc.
A few years ago, I was commuting from MI to WI weekly, thus, my primary residence was no longer primary. I registed to vote, did the change of address, etc to my rental in WI. Got called for jury duty, and responded to state I did not live there full time, thus - I am not an eligible jurist…
Got called again…I had to CC the sheriff on the email for it to stop. And amusingly, I got called for jury duty in WI that month…fascinating coincidence.
I also had to remind the city clerk that I was no longer entitled to the home property tax exemption as I was not living there full time…
After reading all the replies I realized the problem might be that she is still registered to vote. In Suffolk County, NY (Long Island) if you vote you end up getting jury notices. I’m not sure how they are connected, but everyone seems to agree that jury duty is the price you pay to vote.
Today I went to Yaphank, county offices for various things including voter registration, along with her death certificate, and removed her from the voting roles. I’m not sure why that doesn’t happen automatically, because the office on the same floor, just down the hall, is the who issued the death certificate in the first place, but here we are. I asked the woman if this would remove her from the jury pool list and of course she didn’t know, so tomorrow it is off to Riverhead to ask them that question. If I wasn’t retired with time on my hands this would be a real PITA. As it is it is just annoying, but it does give me something to do, and I like to push back on people who think they deserve positional respect and authority. The woman in Yaphank was too nice to give me the chance, but Riverhead will be a different story.
I could see how this was overlooked and can fall through the cracks of the system/process…
The onus to notify the various agencies that someone has died is on family, guardians, etc. The deceased can’t do it themselves, so there’s that . There’s lots of dead folks that still appear to be living (and collecting govt issued SS checks). So a database of the dead doesn’t really exist nor might it be that accurate.
If a death has been registered, and some clerk or program was tasked to routinely check if a person on an arrest warrant is registered as dead - I would think most of the time the results of a check would come up negative (not dead), even if it’s a false negative. So it’s not worth having this as a dedicated check/process. I mean, while many die, many more are living and breathing.
I think the unusual part is that they actually followed through on the arrest warrant and went out to serve it.
It was about 10 years ago or so that I got a summons for jury duty in Onondaga County, NY. A place I hadn’t lived in since 1992 when we moved out of state. What’s odd is that my mom/stepdad no longer lived at the address either as they had moved. They sent the summons to my dad’s house. I guess because we have the same name (Sr. and Jr.)??? I was never a resident at my dad’s house.
So my dad, not paying attention to the Jr. part of the name, went to jury duty. When he showed ID they told him he was the wrong person.
. There’s lots of dead folks that still appear to be living (and collecting govt issued SS checks). So a database of the dead doesn’t really exist nor might it be that accurate.