House to discuss bill on student jury duty

When MSU law graduate student Philip Ellison was summoned to jury duty last October, he was eager to fulfill his civic duty.

That was until MSU College of Law officials told Ellison he could not be excused from classes to serve.

“Because of the law school’s strict attendance policy, if you missed more than a couple of classes or if a trial goes more than two weeks — no matter what your grades were at the end — you wouldn’t get credit for any of the courses you took,” he said.

Ellison wrote letters to various Michigan lawmakers expressing his concern, and soon after, state Rep. Mark Meadows, D-East Lansing, drafted a plan that allows full-time college students to postpone jury duty while taking classes.

Meadows introduced the bill in the Michigan House of Representatives Thursday, and it will be discussed this week in the House Judiciary Committee, he said.

“We already had in the law an exemption for high school students but nothing for college students,” Meadows said. “It was pretty clear that we probably should take a look at that issue, and it’s an easy fix because all we have to do is change the existing statute that exempts high school students.”

Any Michigan citizen age 18 and older can be summoned for jury duty.

State Rep. Tonya Schuitmaker, R-Lawton, said juror clerks usually are understanding about juror’s other commitments.

“I don’t think it is a huge problem,” she said. “That being said, it may be more of a problem in certain jurisdictions. Most counties already do this, but I don’t think (there) is any harm in — just like high school students can get a deferment — extending that to college and upper graduates.”

Currently, residents can be excused from jury duty for work, health, family or personal issues and full-time high school students can be excused until the end of the school year.

Under the proposed bill, full-time university, college and community college students also would be excused from jury duty during the school year.

“When students are forced to miss class they are losing valuable tuition money and, oftentimes, their grades are also docked points,” Meadows said. “There’s no reason we can’t allow our hard-working college students to defer their civil duty to a later date as well.”

Ellison said he could have lost as much as $25,000 in tuition and fees if he had been forced to serve extended jury duty during the school semester.

MSU doesn’t have a set jury duty policy for students, only for faculty and staff, MSU spokesman Tom Oswald said. However, the courts usually are willing to work with students, he said.

Updating the statute will create uniformity in the law and clarify the law for juror clerks, Meadows said.

Ellison said he is surprised how quickly his letter turned into a bill and he hopes it moves as quickly to become law.

“It was just one letter,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is a problem, and someone has to say something so other people don’t get stuck like I did.’ It is really going to help a lot of college students at all levels — graduate, undergraduate and law students.”

Staff writer Zane McMillin contributed to this report.