Breast-feeding Maryland mom faces fine or jail time
Elizabeth Jett, mother to an exclusively breastfed infant and a five-year-old, failed to show up for jury duty in Maryland this October. She initially attempted to get out of service until the summer, but court officials denied her request offering her dates in January instead. Rather than agree to a date in January, she just didn’t show up to court and called in the morning of her service to say she wasn’t going. In January she was asked to come in to talk with the judge about her situation and found she was actually being held in contempt of court.
Breastfeeding a young infant is incredibly time consuming. Even if Jett were able to find appropriate child care she’d still need to be excused from court proceedings several times a day in order to express milk. Postponing her jury duty for a few extra months makes it more likely that she’d be able to serve well, rather than being distracted by her rock-hard boobs and the fear of squirting breastmilk all over her fellow jurors. I don’t think that it was right of her to just skip out on jury duty and I don’t think that it was wrong of the judge to hold her in contempt of court under the circumstances, but mothers of infants should be given some leeway in regards to rescheduling jury duty.
Lawmakers have proposed legislation that would allow breastfeeding mothers with young children to be excused from jury duty. This hasn’t gone over well.
Brian Frosh, Chair for the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, said the law would cause more people to try to postpone their duties, “If you start saying, we’re gonna excuse people for breastfeeding, you’ve gotta say ok to kidney dialysis, chemotherapy and all the other maladies that afflict the human condition.”
Frosh was also quoted as saying, “I really hope we don’t have to get in the business of passing laws for every excuse you may have for jury duty,” because obviously chemo is a lousy excuse for skipping out on one’s civic duties. Did my sarcasm come across clearly enough there? Because clearly Frosh is a dick. I mean seriously, chemo isn’t a good enough excuse to be excused from jury duty? Has he ever met anyone going through chemotherapy?
Frosh’s dickheadery aside, I think that Jett screwed up big time by failing to report. The law is law. Had she responded to letters and agreed to reschedule she wouldn’t be in this position.
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March 26th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Jesus! Far be it from ANYONE to be cancer-stricken and bereft if their jury-duty responsibilities!!!
I do agree with you, there is a way to handle every situation and obviously by rescheduling her date they were doing their part to work with her.
She should have gotten a job with a legal newspaper like I did…when the judge found out he more or less booted me out of the jury box!
March 26th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
That’s ridiculous. In Virginia you can most definitely get out of jury duty if you are breastfeeding. You can also get out of it by being a stay at home mom who is primarily responsible for the kids during the day.
FINALLY, one way at which our state is better than Maryland!! Usually we are the ones 100 years behind the times.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Yeah, I got out of jury duty for being the primary caregiver of a child under six. Of course, that isn’t on the form we got in the mail as a possible excuse, but my husband is a lawyer so he knew that I could get out of it for that reason. So, I won’t have to have jury duty for another six years or so, it sounds like. Although I doubt I would’ve made it on the jury anyway - my husband and father-in-law are both lawyers and my brother-in-law is a police officer.