The only person who hadn’t been vaccinated against Covid-19 was excluded from serving on a jury in a federal courtroom in Manhattan because unvaccinated jurors are likely to disrupt judicial proceedings, the judge overseeing the employment case against a law firm said.

Unvaccinated people are substantially more likely to get the virus and to transmit it to others, raising the possibility of quarantine requirements for all participants in a federal civil trial, Judge Valerie E. Caproni of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said.

Excluding unvaccinated people, moreover, doesn’t violate the Jury Selection and Service Act, Caproni said. Unvaccinated people aren’t a “distinctive” group within the community, and there’s nothing to say their viewpoints won’t be represented by vaccinated jurors, she said.

Caproni’s Dec. 10 opinion explains her decision to limit the jury to unvaccinated people in an employment retaliation trial by attorney David Joffe against King & Spalding, his former employer. The trial ended in a verdict for the law firm.

The case originally was set for a jury trial in 2020, but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. After the Southern District of New York resumed in-person jury trials, it adopted social distancing protocols that meant only two trials could take place at a time.

In an effort to expand the number of trials,...

Read Full Story: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/unvaccinated-new-yorker-excl...