Picking, choosing weakens entire Bill of Rights

We’re fanatics about our Constitutional rights around here, right? If someone tries to infringe on our First Amendment right to free exercise of religion, we will cry foul. If someone infringes on our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, we will become apoplectic.
But for our Sixth Amendment right — the one that says we are entitled to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury — we may be less fervent. We believe in the Sixth as strongly as we do the First and Second when it comes to our own right to a fair trial before an impartial jury, but when it comes to someone else, we start getting lukewarm.
Or so it would appear to Panola County Circuit Clerk Melissa Meek-Phelps who said that our citizens are getting slack in responding to jury summons and with being willing to serve as jurors.
Retired Supreme Court Justice George C. Carlson raises the level of jury service from a legal obligation to a right in which all citizens should feel privileged to participate. Carlson said that during his years as a circuit judge, he would remind those summoned for possible jury service that for almost 250 years men and women have fought and died for this country, protecting the ideals on which it was founded. Serving on a jury is an opportunity to honor their sacrifices, Carlson said.
The retired jurist acknowledged that jury service can be inconvenient, taking the juror away from family or job time.
“Our system of government, while far from perfect, is the least imperfect system of government man has ever devised,” Carlson said. “Your being called on to serve on a criminal or civil jury is the most important part of the whole legal system.”
Only a juror can make a decision based on the facts presented in the courtroom. No one else — not the judge, the court reporter nor the attorneys — can do that job.