Jury duty is both a privilege and an obligation, but there’s no obligation to be in two places at once!

Dual residents have more flexibility than others in deciding where to do their jury service, and registering to vote in the country shouldn’t land you on a jury there, unless that’s where you prefer to serve.

If you register to vote upstate, sooner or later you’ll probably receive a juror questionnaire or even a summons in the mail. (The same thing is likely to happen if you choose to register your car upstate or use that address on your driver’s license.)  If you prefer to serve in the City, just call the Commissioner of Jurors for your upstate county and explain the situation.  In Dutchess, at any rate, if you convince the Commissioner  that you’re a bona fide member of the City jury pool, he won’t keep you in the upstate pool. We haven’t checked elsewhere yet, but imagine the same policy applies.  (If you have relevant experience in this, for good or for ill, please contact us.)

Some people prefer to serve upstate, but that’s a little harder to arrange, because the Manhattan County Clerk needs all his eligible jurors. For him, membership in an upstate county’s juror pool isn’t enough: he wants to see a certificate of actual service upstate before he’ll let you out of his pool. To obtain that, you might consider volunteering for jury service upstate, which is one way to solve the problem.

In any event, once you’ve actually served on a jury or reported for service anywhere in New York State, you are exempt from additional service anywhere in the state for several years (depending on how many days you served, and in which court). The Federal courts generally have reciprocity with the State courts on these issues. If your second home is in another state, while we haven’t checked, it’s likely that they’ll respect your New York certificate of service, too, and vice versa.

Q: How do I convince the upstate Commissioner that I’m in the City Jury pool?

A: You might be asked to present the documents (especially your state income tax returns) that back up what you say about your City home, and the upstate Juror Commissioner’s office may check with their counterparts in the City to make sure you’re telling a consistent story in both places. But at the end of the day, you shouldn’t be required to serve upstate if you prefer not to.