Jurors Rest Their Case: Long Wait Guilty of Boredom

They sit on long rows of orange and olive-drab vinyl couches, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups, reading newspapers and books and talking with one another. In the corner, several people huddle around a black-and-white television set to watch “Sale of the Century.”

It is 9:30 a.m., a new day in the jury waiting room at the Van Nuys Courthouse.

Four women at the back of the room, veterans of jury duty, waste no time in starting a card game called Shanghai.

“We know what’s in store for us,” says Rose Shrogan, playing a three of diamonds.

“Boredom,” says Shirley Francis. She laughs.

“You can only read so many books,” says Sandy Moldafsky, tossing a card onto the table.

“The wheels of justice are turning slowly here,” says Agnes Kwan.

More than 300 people report to the Van Nuys Courthouse every day to serve on juries hearing cases that range from traffic violations to foreclosures to murder. About 100 are hearing trials already in progress. The remaining 200 must wait in the fifth-floor waiting room until they are needed for trial.

Some wait only a few minutes. Others wait hours. An average of 20 each day are not called.

“You hope you get called because at least you feel you are working in the justice system,” says Sidney Fish, a 59-year-old Tarzana businessman. Instead of justice, Fish is working on a puzzle. “Picture yourself sitting in here all day long,” he says. “It’s either read, sleep or go down to the cafeteria and drink more coffee.”

room boredom “ever since the first juror was called,” said Raymond Arce, director of jury services for Los Angeles County. About 85,000 Los Angeles County residents serve as jurors each year.

Arce said boredom is, to a great extent, unavoidable because with the American system of justice there must always be more jurors on hand than can be used.

There must be enough of them in the jury waiting room to supply each trial scheduled on a given day, even though some of the trials will be postponed or settled without needing jurors.

Delays and More Delays

For those trials that do begin on the day they are scheduled, jurors may still have to wait for hours because many judges will delay beginning a trial until they have disposed of other proceedings on the daily calendar, such as sentencings and hearings. Calendar matters may take half an hour or half the day.

Even when a jury panel, usually 35 jurors, is called into the courtroom, it is ultimately pared to 12 jurors and two alternates by pretrial questioning, in which lawyers attempt to select jurors who, because of stated or presumed biases, are more likely to decide in their favor. The 21 jurors excused from the case during the questioning return to the jury waiting room and wait to be called for another panel.

And it is not a sure bet that a potential juror will be called on a panel. When a judge requests a jury panel, the supervisor of the waiting room draws 35 names from a box.

“The whole process is unpredictable,” Arce said.

He said, however, that a series of government studies during the mid-1970s have improved conditions for potential jurors in the last 10 years.

Among recent improvements, perhaps the most important is the implementation of a call-in system by which potential jurors telephone the waiting room at 11 a.m. each day. By that time the jury supervisor has a better idea of how many jurors will be needed and tells them to either come in after lunch, report the next morning or call back the next day.

The county has instituted such a system in 11 of its 32 Superior and Municipal Court waiting rooms. The Van Nuys Courthouse and 20 others are scheduled to implement the call-in system by next year.

Arce said the call-in system is very effective in cutting down the waiting time of jurors, but he cautioned that it is not a cure-all. Nothing, he said, can effectively deal with last-minute continuations and settlements that leave jurors stranded in the waiting room.

In some counties, prospective jurors are put on call and must come to court within one hour after being telephoned by the jury supervisor. Arce said Los Angeles County experimented with such a system but had trouble getting jurors to show up on time.

Other recent improvements in the juror system locally and nationwide include:

Better communication between judges and jury room supervisors. Each afternoon, Van Nuys jury supervisor Janet Klum calls all the judges in the courthouse in an effort to estimate how many jurors will be needed the next day. If few jury trials are scheduled to begin the next day, Klum will give some of the jurors on duty that week the day off.

Making jury waiting rooms more comfortable. Although the Van Nuys jury room, with its airport terminal-style furniture, is hardly luxurious, it does have private bathrooms, pay telephones, card tables and piped-in “easy-listening Muzak.” Klum has donated a backgammon set, Monopoly and several other board games.

A 1978 state law reduced jury duty to 10 days or through the completion of a trial. In Los Angeles County, those 10 days are served over a period of three weeks, allowing for days off when jurors are not needed.

The use of driver’s license and identification card records from which to draw jurors. This improvement, a 1981 state law, increased the juror pool beyond just registered voters.

Arce said future reforms may include more discipline on the part of judges and attorneys in scheduling jury trials, further use of the call-in system and a reduction of jury duty to the “one day or one trial” system by which jurors are called only one day each year and must remain until completion of any trial to which they are assigned.

called and fewer than 40 people are left waiting in the jury room.

There is almost no chatter. One woman talks quietly at a pay telephone. A young man taps his foot to music playing on his stereo headphones. A few people watch television.

Sally Pesqueira, a 42-year-old Pacific Bell worker from Van Nuys, sits by the door knitting a red-and-white sweater.

“This is my first time on jury duty, so I’m taking advantage,” she says. “I love it. Where else can I get paid for knitting?”

Pesqueira is being paid by her employer while she serves. For others who are not paid by their employers, the county pays $10 and 15 cents a mile one way.

A few jurors pace the hallway outside.

“It’s too hot and stuffy in there,” says Frank Vita, 34, of Van Nuys, who is a maintenance man for Lockheed Corp.

With boredom comes bitterness among some waiting jurors and impromptu discussions of the jury duty system.

“If I was on trial, I wouldn’t want someone who had been sitting in the jury room saying, ‘I’m so bored,’ ” says Moldafsky, 37, of Sylmar.

“I don’t know what’s going on in the courts,” says Shrogan, 64, of Sepulveda, “but there seems to be a great deal of waste here of manpower.”

Several jurors complain that they were serving a second or third jury duty, although friends and relatives had never been called to serve. Fish says he thinks the government should hire professional jurors--civil servants who work full time hearing trials.

“You know what makes me mad?” asks Gary Kaplan, a 40-year-old jewelry salesman from Canoga Park who was helping Fish with the puzzle. “They seem to call some of the other people four or five times a day. Maybe they don’t like the way we look.”

By 11:45, rejected jurors from the morning jury panels begin to wander into the room.

It is lunch time, and the jurors happily leave for restaurants near the courthouse. One woman remains, eating a bag lunch and watching television.

affect what goes on in the court room, some judges and attorneys say.

Deputy Dist. Atty. John Spillane said that in his experience with questioning jurors, it is obvious, in most cases, that they would rather be selected to hear the trial than be excused and sent back to the jury room.

“They don’t want to sit around for two weeks. They want to get on the case,” Spillane said.

Municipal Judge Michael Luros went as far as to say that jurors, bored of sitting in the jury room, try to impress lawyers during the selection process.

Avoiding Being Excused

“While jurors try to give you honest answers, many will give you answers in a way they feel is conducive to their remaining on the jury and not being excused,” Luros said. “The reaction you get is their disappointment at being sent back to the jury room.”

Several deputy district attorneys agreed with Luros. But other judges said they did not believe jurors used their answers to try to be selected.

“It is my impression that when jurors are called in to do a job . . . they do that job,” said Fred Rimerman, presiding San Fernando Superior Court judge.

Most judges and attorneys point to the call-in system as the most useful tool for reducing jurors’ waiting time. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Carroll, head of the Van Nuys district attorney’s office, said jurors would have to wait less if attorneys were not continually late to court because they have too many cases scheduled too closely together.

Carroll also said judges and attorneys could make the court system more efficient by eschewing stall-tactic motions and long-winded orations.

“Attorneys do love to talk,” Carroll said.

Despite all the proposed reforms, judges and attorneys echoed the cautions of county officials in saying that nothing is a cure-all to juror boredom.

“By the very nature of the system, you always have to have more jurors than you can use,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Norman Montrose. “There are so many factors no one can control.”

“When you’re talking about jury duty, it is very much like the army. It is all hurry up and wait,” said Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Irwin Nebron.

lunch and only about 20 jurors are left in the waiting room. Several are stretched out on couches sleeping. “One Life to Live” unfolds unwatched in the corner. “For All We Know” plays in the background.

Still more rejected jurors straggle in during the afternoon.

“They didn’t want me,” says one man, shrugging his shoulders and smiling.

Moldafsky returns at 3 p.m. She complains that her panel, called out just before lunch, had to wait outside the courtroom for an hour before the bailiff called them in.

“It is a terrible waste of human resources to have all these people come and sit here,” says Eugene Hoffman. “I know they don’t want to run out of jurors, but it seems they go too far the other way.

The 62-year-old North Hollywood man was also excused from the panel that had to wait outside the courtroom for an hour.

“If any company treated its customers this way, it would sure have a public relations problem,” says Hoffman, who handles public relations for Blue Shield.

By 3:30, activity has picked up. Almost 60 people are in the room, and chatter drowns out the background music. Five or six people watch an old war movie on television. There is a bridge game in the back of the room.

Eric Price walks in. The 43-year-old computer programmer from Van Nuys has just been excused from a seventh jury in eight days.

“I’d rather be here in the jury room playing bridge,” he says.

At 3:45, Klum tells the jurors they can go home. Except for a few jurors, everyone is asked to return the next morning.

“Good!” says one man, sarcastically. “We can come back tomorrow and do this again.”