Supreme Court to Weigh County Jury Duty Policy Against Fair-Trial Right

The state Supreme Court agreed Thursday to decide whether a Los Angeles County policy of assigning jurors to courthouses nearest their homes to minimize travel time violates the constitutional rights of criminal defendants.

The justices will review an appellate ruling last April that upheld a 20-mile limit on travel by jurors but said that further reducing the distance for their convenience denied defendants a jury drawn from a “fair cross-section of the community.”

The issue arose in the case of a defendant who claimed that a Long Beach jury that convicted him of second-degree murder was unrepresentative because too many blacks within the 20-mile radius had been assigned to other courthouses closer to their homes.

State and local prosecutors had asked the justices to review the case, contending that appellate ruling would be very difficult to implement in California’s most complex and congested county court system.

32 Courthouses in County Require Jury Pools

“We’re very pleased the court agreed to hear the case,” said state Deputy Atty. Gen. Mark Alan Hart.

“There are 32 courthouses in Los Angeles County that require jury pools,” he said. “If you try to use a 20-mile radius for each courthouse, there will be a lot of overlap, with some jurors being called to serve more than others. It would require some awfully fancy computer programming.”

In a related development, the justices also agreed Thursday to review an appellate court ruling saying that a defendant is entitled to be tried by a jury from the immediate area of the city of Los Angeles where the alleged offense was committed.

The appeal court barred officials from transferring the trial of a drunk-driving defendant to San Fernando when there was a temporary shortage of judges in downtown Los Angeles. Had the case not been transferred, it could have been dismissed for failure to provide the defendant with a speedy trial, the officials said.

Most Recent Test of Long Effort by County Authorities

The juror travel case represents the most recent test of a long effort by county authorities to provide defendants with representative juries while minimizing inconvenience to people called for jury duty.

In the county, prospective jurors are selected randomly from more than 5 million names found in voter registration and motor vehicle records. The aim is to field jury panels that best reflect the community’s racial, social and economic characteristics.

State statutes also allow larger counties to “reasonably minimize” distances to be traveled by jurors and specifically provide that in Los Angeles, no juror will be required to serve more than 20 miles from home. To further reduce hardship and inconvenience, a county policy directs jurors to the closest courthouse in that 20-mile radius.

The case before the court involves the second trial of Eddie Bobby McDonald, whose original first-degree murder conviction and sentence to death for the murder of Jose Esparza in August, 1979, in Long Beach was overturned by the state Supreme Court in 1984 because a defense witness had been improperly excluded from testifying.

At retrial, McDonald cited statistics showing that although the 1980 census showed that 14.8% of the population within 20 miles of the Long Beach courthouse was black, a subsequent survey showed blacks made up 6.2% of the jury panels there. The disparity resulted because many blacks were being assigned to courthouses in Comptom, Watts and other areas nearer their homes, he said.

Prosecutors countered that the system was not discriminatory and submitted their own statistics to show that throughout the county, black jurors matched or exceeded the 11.4% black share of544499813older. At the trial, two members of the jury were black.

‘Undue Weight’

The state Court of Appeal, in an opinion written by Appellate Justice Arleigh Woods, ordered a third trial for McDonald, holding that the county’s policy had given “undue weight” to juror convenience at the expense of McDonald’s right to a jury reflecting a fair cross-section of the community.

In this instance, the “community” must be defined as the area within the 20-mile radius, the court said, and the county’s system of assigning jurors to courthouses nearest their homes effectively reduced that community, resulting in a disparity of minority representation on juries.

Prosecutors, appealing the ruling to the state Supreme Court, said the appellate court’s definition of community had “no basis in law or geography” and had given officials no guidance on how to draw jurors from overlapping 20-mile zones and still guarantee juries representing a cross-section of the community.