Court "Order for Lunch"

You can see such orders in court dockets, mostly in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and might be curious just what's on the menu. Unfortunately, the document doesn't include the lunch order as such, but rather a court order authorizing the purchase of lunch for jurors. The Northern District of California also sometimes issues orders for jury breakfast, most recently in Elon Musk v. Samuel Altman (to be delivered through AI-using delivery robots, doubtless).

As I understand it, most courts don't routinely provide meals for jurors, but at least some courts do it at least some of the time, for instance during jury deliberations. I assume that courts in other federal districts likewise at least sometimes provide meals for jurors as well without requiring a court order. But I'm happy to be corrected if I'm mistaken on that.

Comments

[The Margrave of Azilia]

It was not always thus. They used to try to keep the jurors hungry.

From the abstract of an article:

"One of the most famous sayings in English comes from Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock (1714): “Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine.” Those words have been widely quoted by lawyers, judges, literati, and laymen to condemn hasty, ill-considered verdicts and to express anxieties about juries and the judicial system itself. Even though nowadays Pope is usually credited with having invented a bit of fanciful hyperbole for comic or satiric effect, the aphorism epitomizes a long tradition in English common law that forbade deliberating jurors' eating or drinking before announcing their verdict. Statements of the common-law principle, in judicial rulings and commentaries, from the thirteenth century through the eighteenth, tended to fall into formulaic patterns, as they listed the amenities that jurors were to forgo and gradually developed practical means of ameliorating or circumventing the harsher aspects of the prohibition."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0098261X.2007.10767840

[David Nieporent]

In contrast, there's a famous quote from the trial of the men prosecuted for lynching Emmett Till. The jurors took an hour to acquit, and one of the jurors later said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."

[The Margrave of Azilia]

If some guy gets pardoned from Death Row at the last minute, can the jury have the last meal which was planned for him?

[David Nieporent]

Well, that wouldn't be ironic.

[not guilty]

All but one of Jeffrey Dahmer's killings took place in Milwaukee, where Wisconsin did not have the death penalty. The first one, however, occurred in Ohio, which did.

The rumor was that authorities there decided not to seek death because of the tradition of the condemned prisoner being served whatever he requested for his last meal.

And lest we forget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWUrU5ge1kU&list=RDwWUrU5ge1kU&start_radio=1

[Bored Lawyer]

Maybe they can go down the hall to the grand jury room and find a ham sandwich.

[SRG2]

That the jury were deprived of food when convicting the defendant should be grounds for appeal, consistent with the findings in this modern classic:

Extraneous factors in judicial decisions

We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges. We record the judges’ two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct “decision sessions.” We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.

[Longtobefree]

Reminds me of an old cartoon:
A guy is hanging out of the door marked "jury room", tie loose, collar wilted, two days growth of beard, talking to a police officer.
"We want 11 ham sandwiches, one cheese sandwich; 11 coffees, one tea - - - "

[SJKofNJ]

Many, many years ago, I clerked for a criminal court judge. In those days, the jurors always got lunch for free. Everyone, including the jurors, knew it. It was a sure bet that if deliberations began in the morning, there'd be no verdict until after the lunch break.

[John F. Carr]

I spent two days in jury selection, not picked, with nothing to eat. The jury selection day ended around 2 PM so I could get a late or early meal at home.

It was a routine drug case, nothing with publicity or unusual questioning. Do we trust cops, do we hate black people, do we know the parties or witnesses.

[Currentsitguy]

I wish that were the case in the Western part of PA. Last time I was called I sat in the pool for a good 12 hours. We got a half hour break for lunch. Between parking and the cost of lunch I spent far more than the paltry $12 they pay for you to sit there all day. In the end they plea bargained everyone without ever being spoken to. Thank god they let e bring my e-book reader in after I convinced the bailiff that it wasn't an internet connected tablet. I'd have gone postal if I were forced to watch the Jerry Springer reruns they had on the TV all day.