Murky, but gratifying. This is a hot-news followup to my 9/20 posting “Annals of bureaucracy: the jury summons”, about my summons to jury duty in Santa Clara County, which sent me to a website where I registered as a potential juror and went on to the Request for Hardship Excusal page, where I checked the box:
I have a physical, psychological, or emotional condtion that makes it impossible for me to serve and no assistance or accommodation will help. If you are under the age of 70 or seeking a permanent excusal, you must submit a recently dated, signed recommendation from your doctor on official letterhead.
Then from my earlier posting:
I was willing to get a hardship excusal just for this occasion, so I submitted this form. Immediately, a response:
Your Request for Hardship Excusal was successfully submitted on 09/20/24.
And then [grrr] almost immediately after that:
You are checking too early. To receive your instructions for your assigned week [the week of 10/14], you will need to return to this web page the weekend (Saturday or Sunday) prior to 10/14/2024. [that is, on 10/12 or 13]
This is Act 1.
Act 2. That seemed a bit risky. So I set about getting one of my doctors to write a letter for a permanent excusal. This turned into a nightmare. Nobody was willing to write the letter without an office appointment in which they could assess me, a reluctance I found baffling (though one wrote a letter for a temporary excusal). But it takes months to get a non-emergency appointment with my doctors (while an emergency appointment would get me some other doctor who doesn’t know my situation). So yesterday (which was a massively awful day, thanks to a 91F high temperature and plunging barometric pressure) I steeled myself for applying, on 10/12 or 13, for excusal from my summons for the 10/14 week, and hoping that would work.
Act 3. Then, in today’s mail, from the Jury Commissioner’s Office, a postcard saying:
Your request to be excused from jury duty is granted for this summons. You will be exempt from jury service for a period of 12 months. You may receive another summons some time in the future and your situation will need to be reviewed again at that time.
Whew. That I can cope with. I already have November appointments with all three of my relevant MDs: in Family Practice, Nephrology (advanced kidney disease being my principal affliction), and Rheumatology (for my various degenerative joint conditions). So I could extract a letter from one of them, with plenty of time for the case to work its way through the bureaucracy.
Postlude. Back on 9/25, e-mail from one of my caregivers, who had learned of my jury summons hassles and wrote:
I was summoned last month, sat in the selection room for hours where a gigantic notice on the wall stated that [crucial rule boldfaced] you can be excused if you’re over the age of 75, no documentation is required. You just need to respond to the summons notice, state your age and you will be excused. I just helped a client with his summons, happy to help with yours. They definitely do not expect anyone over 75 years old to show up.
Still in a deep funk, I replied:
This used to be the law in California, so I was surprised to get the jury summons and the instructions on it (which I posted on my blog), which are quite clear that you can apply to get excused for this particular service (though not until the weekend before you are summoned to serve), but to get permanent excusal you must submit a letter from your physician attesting that you are in fact permanently unable to serve. [Apparently,] the law has changed, and it [seems to be] quite strict.
(As far as I can tell, CA and NY are now the only states with such a law; everywhere else, when you reach a certain age (70 or 75, depending on the state) you simply state your age and get an excusal for the rest of your life (if you want it).)
I have served on juries in both Ohio and California, but in my current condition (needing a walker to get around, unable to climb steps, and needing to urinate every 20 or 30 minutes, among other things) I could not possibly manage. And the crucial fact: I have stopped getting worse, but I’m not going to get any better; I have found ways to manage a very constricted daily life at home, but have been unable to do anything else (I’ve had no life at Stanford for 10 years now, and never will have one; elaborate arrangements allowed me to give one last public lecture in 2017, but that’s it).
Emotionally, this is a disaster.
But, but … what about the boldfaced stuff above?
Well, it doesn’t say permanently excused — just excused (for this service, presumably). But if you can be excused because of age every time you’re summoned for jury duty, that’s functionally equivalent to being permanently excused because of age, and the current CA law plainly doesn’t allow that without a doctor’s letter; note the language in my excusal postcard (“your situation will need to be reviewed again at that time”).
Maybe the sign my caregiver saw is a remnant of earlier legal times, age is no longer relevant, and now you have to plead inability to serve each time you’re called for jury duty, but you can apply for this when you register for jury duty, not only right before your service week. Maybe, on the other hand, the rules do grant excusal on the grounds of age, and that’s why I got my totally unexpected excusal (before 10/12), but only, bizarrely, for a year. Maybe the instructions are just all balled up.
My head hurts.
September 29, 2024 at 8:12 am |
A further development. While all the above was going on, another one of my caregivers, who’s had considerable experience with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, just went to the Palo Alto center and engaged with the assistant to my rheumatologist; the assistant agreed to put the case to the doctor when he returned to the office. The doctor eventually supplied a letter (for a temporary excusal, I thought), which his office supplied to me as an electronic message in the PAMF message center.
By the time I got to dealing with this, I’d gotten my mystery temporary excusal. Then I discovered that the rheumatologist’s letter recommended permanent excusal!
But then an electronic copy wouldn’t do; I needed a letterhead original. So now I’ve written the rheumatologist’s assistant, asking them to send this to me by US mail, so I could submit it to the Jury Commission (the rules don’t allow physicians to submit the letters themselves). Fortunately, there’s lot of time — at least a year — for all this to grind through the bureaucracy.
I’m working on cultivating calm. And trying not to think about Kafka.