Fun With Maths

Posted by Venerable High Pope Swanage I, Cogent Animal of Our Lady of Discord 10 June 2014 at 08:13PM

I have lived in Baltimore County, Maryland exclusively since November of 2004.

In that time I have only received one Jury summons, it was for tomorrow, and my call in number was 365. I ducked getting called, as they only wanted 1 through 225.

Looking at the call in messages for today and for tomorrow, it appears that ~400 individuals are chosen each day. If one presumes the courts are only operating on standard business days, that yields about 248 days of 400 individuals. Each year, then, 99,200 individuals are randomly summoned to appear as jurors.

Presently the population of Baltimore County is approximately 817,455. If the proportion of summoned jurors to population held constant over the past ten years (a groundless assumption), then each year an individual has a ~12.13% chance of being summoned. Consequently your odds are ~87.87% of not being selected in any given year.

The odds of successfully avoiding summonses for 9 years in a row are ~31.22%. By purely random chance, one could expect to get a Jury Summons once every 5 years (.8787^5 = .5238). The odds of getting summoned two years in a row are ~1.5%.