County Forced to Step Up Its Search for Jury Panelists

A surge in the demand for jurors has sent the Los Angeles County office of the jury commissioner scrambling to enlarge its roster of potential panelists.

As a result, mailings to prospective jurors will increase 36%--from 950,000 last year to 1.3 million during fiscal year 1988-89, Raymond Arce, director of the Superior Court’s jury division, said Monday.

Arce said there is pressure on his office because trials today are longer and more complicated than they were five years ago, leading to court requests for “extraordinarily large jury panels.”

At the same time, he said, the supply of qualified jurors is down because employers increasingly are refusing to excuse their workers for service on lengthy cases.

When a case is expected to last more than a month--or 22 court days, the reimbursable jury-service pay period allowed by many large companies--it “requires finding employers who are willing to pay for longer absences,” he said.

“Employers are getting more and more firm,” Arce said. “They say certain employees are critical to their operation and they can’t do without them. They try to get employees excused, and we’re having to negotiate more and more with them.”

Arce said he began to notice the increased need for jurors in 1983, “but not to this extent.” Until two months ago, he said, the yield from questionnaires mailed to prospective panelists was adequate to meet courts’ needs. Now, he said, the numbers are falling short.

“Our supply-and-demand figures indicated in late May and June that we had to take steps to . . . bring the numbers up,” Arce said.

“It appears that lawyers are calling more witnesses and presenting more physical evidence at each trial.”

But lawyers disagree on the reasons for the increased demand.

Charles Gessler, an attorney with the county public defender’s office, said the surge is attributable less to court procedure than to the expected “usual late-summer pile-up” of cases ready for trial.

In addition, he said, “there are a number of longer, capital cases ready for trial as soon as everybody comes back from summer vacation--lawyers, judges, and witnesses.”

“I predict this surge will be over in about three months,” the lawyer said.

Larry Grassini, president of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Assn., an organization of civil trial lawyers, blamed the increase in jury calls on his criminal law counterparts.

“If there’s any increase . . . it’s due to the demands of the criminal system, not the civil,” he said. “Over the last two years, the criminal system has slowly invaded the civil courthouse.

“Ninety percent of civil cases can be concluded in 10 days. It’s these criminal cases that go for months and months.”

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert Garcetti said one reason more jurors are needed is that the “caseload per judge is increasing, meaning that each judge has less time each day to spend on jury trials, meaning that each trial lasts longer.

“The normal tour of duty for a juror is two weeks,” Garcetti said. “When jurors hear a trial will go longer, they try to beg off. You have a much smaller group of jurors who can stay for extended trials, so you have to increase your pool.”

Richard C. Davidoff, chairman of the litigation division of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn., gave what he said was “personal speculation” on the rise in demand for jurors.

“In our changing society, with two-income families, people either cannot afford, don’t have time, or do not feel a civic duty toward this community, and they seek to avoid jury duty,” he said. “So it’s harder to obtain the required number of jurors without sending out more mailings.”

Arce said various procedural factors may also account for the surge, such as the county’s expanding use of the juror “call-in system,” in which prospective jurors check in at times designated by the court.

“Under the call-in system, we have to have a larger panel, because there is an increased likelihood that people will not show up,” the jury division director said.

Every week, the commission office receives requests from the 33 superior and municipal courts in the county, according to jury program coordinator Mary Fitten.

Based on the courts’ projection of need, the jury commission each month sends out “prospective juror affidavits” to people randomly chosen from motor-vehicle registration and voter lists, Fitten said. The returned questionnaires are then used to establish a computer data base that contains from 20,000 to 35,000 listings at a given time.

“Last year, it was normal to mail out approximately 3,500 affidavits per week,” Fitten said. “Now the more normal number is about 4,300 per week.”