A St. John's man who answered a call for jury duty says he has no sympathy for people who were briefly jailed last week for ignoring the same call.

Newfoundland Supreme Court Justice James Adams put six people in a lockup for more than five hours last Tuesday. The six had been among those who had ignored court summons to form the pool of prospective jurors for the trial of St. John's physician Sean Buckingham.

'It's something that we have to do and I expect it's something we should all do it when we are called to do it,' Dale Dines says.
(CBC)

Dale Dines, who answered the summons, said he learned plenty from having served on a jury in the early 1990s, and looked forward to doing it again.

"It's something that we have to do and I expect it's something we should all do it when we are called to do it," Dines told CBC News.

"If you just lost your stuff or forgot about it or put it on the fridge and forgot about it — I don't really have any sympathy for those people," he said.

Dines said he was not only comfortable with having been called for jury duty, but disappointed that he was not selected.

Derek Green, the chief justice of the Newfoundland Supreme Court's trial division, said Adams was within his rights to crack down on prospective jurors who failed to show up.

"Serving on a jury is a significant inconvenience to people," Green told CBC News last week.

"It's quite a sacrifice sometimes … but it is one of the very few civic responsibilities that every citizen is expected to perform, if called upon."