I thought that I’d heard all the best excuses for avoiding jury duty. They get repetitious after awhile and you can usually see them coming a mile away as to why they can’t serve.
But a judge saying he can’t be fair, because all the people who are arrested are guilty of something?
As per the Associated Press, regarding Justice Richard T. Snyder, a town justice for 10 years in Petersburgh, New York, as he was being questioned regarding serving on a grand jury:
According to court transcripts, Snyder tried to avoid serving on a jury in 2023 by first identifying himself as a judge and then saying, “I know everybody come in front of me. I know they are guilty. They would not be in front of me.”
And this was not simply a misstatement, because he kept going at the judicial hearing commission:
At a judicial commission hearing the following year, Snyder said he understood that defendants are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty but that he still felt that people wouldn’t be in court if they didn’t commit crimes.
“I meant, that they were guilty because they did something wrong. But they’re not guilty ‘til they come to court. They’re innocent ’til proven guilty,” he told the commission.
Sigh. Even high school kids know that people are presumed innocent — at least the kids who are paying attention.
As Scott Greenfield noted long ago in arguing for the abolishment of non-lawyer judges:
One of New York’s peccadilloes is that you don’t have to be a lawyer to be a judge in our local courts. …It is fundamentally wrong to subject people to a system of justice with the same power as a legitimate system but neither the qualifications nor competence to fulfill its mission.
But they are still here.
And while it is easy to rail against this judge, the question remains, how many others are out there just like him?
That post from Greenfield was written 19 years ago. Nineteen. Years.
And we still have non-lawyers serving as judges. Except for Snyder, who has resigned.