I know a guy who got called to jury duty, and ended up on a jury that was hearing one of the big "state of Xxxxxx vs. the tobacco industry" cases. It went on for multiple months. During that time, he had no source of income. Which meant that he couldn't pay his bills--couldn't pay the rent, utilities, car loan, or child support. Because it was a sequestered jury, he wasn't able to make his visitation appointments to spend time with his daughter. With no child support payments or visitation time, his wife took him to family court to get his visitation rights taken away. He tried several times to claim hardship to get out of the jury duty, but was denied every time, and was threatened with contempt of court jailtime if he didn't stick with it--and, he was still actually believing the whole 'civic duty' crap, and tried to stick it out. He got evicted form his apartment for not paying the rent. His car got repossessed for not making payments. With him unable to make the court time regarding his visitation, his wife was awarded sole custody with no visitation rights. His household property was sold, and the proceeds were given to his ex-wife to cover some of his missed child support payments.
This was all in the late 90's, when his daughter was 6. She's now 15. It was just a year ago that he was finally able to win back some reasonable visitation time.
You know how sometimes you'll see that there's a benefit dinner being held for someone who has some illness, or their kid has some illness, or they were involved in an accident, or the like, and the insurance was insufficient to cover their new needs? There were benefits like that held for this guy--and for at least half of the rest of the jury as well.
Oh, and the case whose jury he was on? After more than four months of testimony, and a couple weeks of jury deliberation, the two sides settled the case out-of-court. The nearly five months of their lives spent on the jury didn't even get rewarded with getting to have an impact on the decision.
Don't start spewing that ridiculous crap about 'civic duty'. The only people I know of that gave more of their lives to civic duty than this guy are soldiers--and they get military pay. People on jury duty deserve at least some reasonable monetary compensation for their time, particularly if their employer doesn't cover such time.