AUBURN – To some, it spells citizenship. To others, hardship. To many, it prompts a review of excuses that would rival an errant student’s failure to get a homework assignment done.

Often, though, people find the summons to jury service rewarding, says Sally Bourget. Once they see the process, she notes, feelings of fear or intimidation are replaced by understanding and even civic pride.

Bourget is clerk of Cumberland County Superior Court in Portland. She earned her veteran’s stripes in the judicial process at Androscoggin Superior Court in Auburn.

Dodging jury service, said Bourget, is a no-no.

“We do have those people who try,” she notes. They’re tracked down, and served with an order to appear before a judge to show cause why they shouldn’t serve.

Lame excuses don’t wash.

Bourget recalled one person summoned to jury service at the Androscoggin County Superior Court a decade or so ago who didn’t take his obligation seriously.

“The judge started fining him $15 a day,” said Bourget, “and tossed him in jail.”

But while some states are seeing an increase in the number of potential jurors dodging their call, Bourget says, “I don’t think it is as widespread as people think it is,” at least not in Maine.

That’s in part because Bourget and her co-workers go to extraordinary measures to help people fulfill their service.

Androscoggin Superior Court Jury Clerk Amy Carman says she bends over backward to accommodate potential jurors.

Jury selection, she notes, is the result of several steps. First, she gets a list of potential jurors from the Secretary of State’s Office. The names on the list – usually about 3,000 – are those of people living in the county who hold a driver’s license or state-issued identification card.

She reviews the answers to a questionnaire each person on the call list fills out. Those who say they’re a student are scheduled for service when school is out. Those who have summer work are scheduled for a winter session.

Selection is “basically random,” Carman notes, but occupation or family issues could prompt her to adjust schedules to better meet a juror’s needs.

Even a vacation can be dealt with, she said, by shifting someone’s service from, say, July to September.

But once summoned to jury service, people should expect to serve.

“I’ll let them postpone twice,” Bourget said, “but that’s it.”

True hardships are the exception – someone with a health problem, providing their doctor signed a letter saying jury service could harm their condition, for example.

Carman said jury duty runs for four to six weeks. A juror could decide several cases during that time, or not be called for any. Jurors have to show up each Monday morning and wait to be called or excused. Jurors could decide criminal or civil trials, or a combination of both.

People also are summoned to serve as grand jurors. That requires sitting in court two or three days a month for a year to hear evidence and decide if it warrants an indictment.

Jurors are reimbursed 15 cents a mile for travel between their home and the court, Carman said, and they’re paid $10 for each day they serve.

In Maine, employers aren’t legally required to pay employees for performing jury service, she said.

There’s no reimbursement for parking.

And there’s no free lunch either, although before the state ran into budget problems a few years back, courts used to feed jurors sitting in deliberation of a case.