Can you make jury service go away? And are you responsible for the bag of tricks on your doormat? Let the New Statesman’s legal expert solve your civil liberties dilemmas

I've just received a summons for jury service, and I'm terrified. I'm not being funny, but I have problems deciding whether to chew gum. Choosing if someone is innocent or guilty is my idea of a nightmare. What can I do? I just want the whole thing to go away.

Annabel Vere, Marlow, Bucks

Jury service can indeed be dreadful; and if it's any comfort, there are many other people - including several government ministers - whose hostility to the jury system seems even greater than yours. You are obliged to attend, however, and recent reforms have made it harder than ever to shirk the duty. Whereas juries once excluded a colourful cross-section of British society, the old rules were abolished in April 2004. No one except felons and the mentally disordered is automatically barred these days. So, you might find yourself sitting alongside any number of reluctant peers of the realm, clergymen and senior judges, subject only to criminal records and psychiatric stability.

There is no easy way out. Once, the usual method of escaping the call was to look stern and clutch a copy of the Daily Telegraph, but this has been redundant since 1988, when defence lawyers lost their rights to exclude jurors. Judges have historically given short shrift to individuals who refuse to reach verdicts, and the leash is likely to tighten. After all, even barristers can now serve on juries - and few people are cagier about expressing their true opinions of a defendant's innocence or guilt.

The only hopes I can offer are not very cheery ones. You will be discharged if, by some stroke of mixed fortune, you happen to be profoundly deaf. A well-calibrated act of disrespect could also see you sent home - demanding to know the defendant's birthday to cast his horoscope has worked in the past, and so has turning up drunk - but miscalculating the judge's mood would take you to the cells instead. You are probably best off doing your bit for the jury system.

I share a house with five mates. One of them is in Amsterdam, and he's just sent me an e-mail going on about what a "magic trip" it is and promising to post us a "bag of tricks". He's a right pill monkey, and it doesn't take much to work out what he means. It's not down to me if something dodgy comes through the letter box, is it?

Ratboy, Sheffield

The law accepts that you are not your brother's keeper, and the presence of controlled substances in a house does not, in itself, incriminate the people who live there. Recreational drugs are nowadays so prevalent that they circulate in very unpredictable ways - indeed, John Reid himself was found recently to have some cannabis in the guest room of his home in Lanarkshire.

In Reid's case, Strathclyde police officers swiftly ruled out the possibility that the drugs belonged to him, once he informed them that they did not. Your own defence might not be quite so easily established (we can't all expect to be treated like a home secretary, after all!) but I am fairly confident that you can remain within the law.

Assuming that you neither encourage nor assist your housemate in any illicit schemes, you will be fine so long as you do not assume "custody" or "control" over the contents of suspicious post. That essentially means that you should refuse unexpected deliveries, and ignore any which make it on to your doormat.

Your domestic arrangements do, however, contain a wild card - in the shape of the remaining tenants - and I should perhaps end with a warning. Forbidden fruit inevitably has its allure. If they were to learn for sure that your housemate had committed a crime, they might think it right not to inform the police, but to conceal the evidence, or even, conceivably, to consume it. It is barely worth explaining just how illegal that would be.

Sadakat Kadri is a barrister and author of "The Trial: a history from Socrates to O J Simpson" (Harper Perennial, 2006). Send your civil liberties and human-rights dilemmas to: Changing the Rules, New Statesman, 52 Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1W 0AU. This column appears fortnightly

*"The rules of the game have changed" Tony Blair, August 2005

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