The court could hold you in contempt and / or impose a $50 fine for each time you fail to appear. If you lose your jury summons, contact the Clerk of Superior Court office in your county as soon as possible to obtain reporting information. Procedures to request an excuse or deferral vary from county to county.
Despite this, a whole range of biases exist that influence jurors when they reach verdicts. Bias here has been defined as a factor that produces a preference towards a certain outcome (acquittal or a conviction). The ramifications of biased and unfair decision-making by jurors can result in injustice.
Either before or after the closing arguments by the lawyers, the judge will explain the law that applies to the case to you. This is the judge's instruction to the jury. You have to apply that law to the facts, as you have heard them, in arriving at your verdict.
You must avoid bias, conscious or unconscious, based on the witness's race, color, religious beliefs, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender in your determination of credibility. The weight of the evidence as to a fact does not necessarily depend on the number of witnesses who testify about it.
Juror #3 is very biased towards the accused teenager, and that is because his own son had once hit him on the jaw and had run away from home at the age of 15. He says, "I've got a kid... when he was fifteen, he hit me in the face... I haven't seen him in three years.
The final Likert scale, called the Juror Bias Scale (JBS), contains 17 items—8 that reflect pretrial expectancies that defendants, in general, commit the crimes with which they are charged and 9 that reflect the value attached to conviction and punishment.
You will also be given additional information from the court staff. Then all jurors present will take an oath as jurors and be given a red juror badge to wear until they are released from jury duty by the judge. Once a trial begins, the judge will instruct you on your duties as a juror.