In the news last week I came across a story about a Minnesota man, Todd Gilly, who was put in jail for a whole day. His crime? Well, one way of answering that question is to say that he told the truth.

Gilly was a potential juror, jailed for contempt because, when the judge asked him if not being able to work his regular job that day was going to have an influence on his ability to be a good juror, he told the truth. He said that it would probably lead him to “go with the flow” to get the process over with more quickly.

Spending a day and a night in jail, having to wear the uniform and eat the food and be out of touch with family, was doubtless hard on Gilly. But the truth is also that being on a jury could be hard on Gilly — or on hundreds of other Minnesotans. They would be the hourly workers called up for jury duty. Unless they’re working at minimum wage, the pathetic $10 plus mileage that jurors get paid for each day of service isn’t going to replace even an hour’s worth of a lost day’s wages. What happens when the jury service lasts more than one day? What if they get called up several times during the same quarter?

What did that judge really know about Gilly’s financial situation before throwing him in jail? Did he do any checking afterward? From what I read in the newspaper, it doesn’t sound like anyone in that courtroom is very interested in what lead Gilly to say what he did. For them, it’s all about the way he said what he did, about a potential juror’s lack of tact in answering a judge’s questions. The man who went to jail wasn’t happy about being called up for jury duty, and he let that unhappiness come out in his answers.

And the supreme irony is that the jury seated after Gilly was taken away in handcuffs was done with their work as jurors that day. If he had kept his concerns to himself, if he hadn’t told the truth, he would have only lost one day’s income. As it is, he lost two.

This past summer I was a potential juror three different times. My experience in Freeborn County courtrooms is that both of the current judges ask questions about this issue. How much of a hardship is being on the jury for people? It seemed to me that these judges were very sensitive to this type of hardship, even if they didn’t automatically dismiss people because of their work duties. Is that true for all of their colleagues?

Potential jurors do not all enter the courtroom facing the same financial situations. Clearly if one is unemployed, even the pathetic $10 is better than the nothing they would earn otherwise. And salaried professionals have incomes that don’t depend on the number of hours they work; they can take days off without financial penalty. Their incomes and expenses may be tight, too, but their worries aren’t going to be as dependent on “clocking in” for a certain number of hours as they are for plumbers or nurses or custodians.

Maybe fairness needs to be more important when making people serve on juries, especially those who lose more income than they can afford to. Maybe it’s time we let some citizens “escape” jury duty. If it’s that important for hourly wage earners to serve on juries, then the state needs to pay them for the time they serve. However, since we’re living in an era in which taxes aren’t seen as even a necessary evil by many of our leaders, that’s not going to happen. So we need to let these hourly workers out of this obligation, not via questioning in the courtroom — too embarrassing — but via questioning before jurors get there. Find a way to let the court actually see the financial burden of jury duty before making them have to decide between telling the truth or keeping silent.

As for Gilly, if the quote I read is an accurate record of his current feelings, in the future he’ll commit the lie of omission in the jury box. Better to get on the jury with anxiety and facing hardship than spend another night in jail for telling the judge what’s really going on in his mind.

David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea. His column appears every other Tuesday.