Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Man sent to jail for 10 days after oversleeping and missing jury duty | ABC News" video.

Connor G I once spent an entire month on jury duty. He screwed up by not just oversleeping, but by failing to inform the court that he had overslept.
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Jerry Ogburn You clearly don't understand the system. The jurors are there primarily to weigh the evidence and to decide whether or not the prosecutor/plaintiff has made its case. They are given all the necessary law they need to render a verdict. If they think there's more they need, they can and do send notes to the judge with requests for clarifications about their instructions. Also, do you have a better method? Jury duty has issues in terms of fairness, but there aren't any real options that are any better.
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He was in contempt of court for failing to call the court and hoping it would just go away. He wasn't sent to jail for oversleeping. That being said, I think that 10 days was rather harsh. A day or perhaps a fine of some sort would have been appropriate. Contempt of court is one of the few tools available to judges to ensure that people stick to the rules of the road in court.
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How many alternates did you have? When I was on Jury duty for a month, there were only a few alternates and we could easily have run out if people had started to just not show up. The length of the jail time seems excessive to me, but they likely wouldn't have held him in contempt of court had he called in and let them know that he overslept. Failing to inform them when he knew is really what the contempt was over in this case, not that he overslept as people keep claiming. I'm sure this judge has multiple people every year that don't show up due to oversleeping and other things that are only partially in their control and this is the one that's making the news.
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He didn't get 10 days for missing jury duty. He got 10 days because he didn't call the court to inform them what had happened. It's hard to say whether he would have received no jail time, a fine or a shorter stay in jail, but this was largely the result of his choice not to call the court to let them know he'd overslept.
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How is this overreach? Arguably, a shorter jail stay might have been warranted, but if we take the ability of judges to hold people in contempt and get to decide on the length, the whole system falls apart. Imagine having to have a full court proceeding every time something like this happens. You'd never get anything done. Holding people in contempt of court is a part of the system and he could have avoided this problem either by getting up on time or by calling the court immediately when he realized that he had overslept. I doubt very much that he was the first to ever oversleep for jury duty. Things like this are one of the reasons why there are alternates.
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While the sentence seems overly harsh to me, he brought it on himself by not calling the court as soon as he realized that he overslept for court. The judge really only had the choice of a fine or putting him in jail to think about what he had done. His life was likely fucked up due to his own choices.
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