Summons to Justice : Juries: When duty calls, Orange County residents find that the real-life experience does not resemble ‘L.A. Law.’

The summons comes in an antiseptic, perforated, computer-printed envelope and it means that you may be deciding whether a woman gets her job back or whether a man goes to the gas chamber.

Which is one reason why the words “jury duty” often trigger feelings of such pronounced uncertainty. Jury duty in Orange County, as in the rest of America, is one of the basic cornerstones of the judicial process in a democracy, but it is also a crap shoot. It has occasionally been criticized as capricious and unrealistic, praised as proven and reliable and, mostly, seen as flawed but superior to any other system of justice.

It has also been constant fodder for drama, in films and on television, and that is as close as many people get to the inside of a courtroom. Generations of Americans have learned--or believe they have learned--about the jury process from “Inherit the Wind” or “Perry Mason” or “L.A. Law.”

The real thing is different. A term on jury duty can be numbingly boring, often inconvenient, frequently frustrating. But it also carries the weight of reality at its most elemental: real people, real law, real disputes, real crime and punishment. Right and wrong, good and evil, life and death.

It all begins at the mailbox.

There are only two absolute requirements for jurors in Orange County: They must be U.S. citizens and residents of the county. They are chosen at random, by computer, from voter registration lists and Department of Motor Vehicles records. They are selected merely by an identifying number, which indicates no demographic information such as age or race.

“That’s the constitutional test,” said Superior Court Judge Richard Beacom. “And it raises some interesting problems. In recent times we’ve had challenges to this because they say that certain identifiable groups have been systematically excluded. But how do you determine that? To maintain the random aspect, you can’t call in 1.5% black and 17% Latino because you violate the Constitution right there just by getting into (non-random) numbers.”

The random selection also often taps into the names of people who have served on juries in the past, some as recently as two years before (jurors become eligible to serve again after two years).

“I hear people say so many times that their wife or husband has been called to jury duty two or three times and they themselves have never been called,” said Evelyn Valle, the jury services supervisor at Orange County Superior Court. It’s completely random, and yet some people feel they’re being picked on.”

The largest selection of potential jurors occurs at Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana, where 1,300 residents are called each month. They are required to report for their first day of service about a month and a half after they receive their summons, and their first day is a full one, from check-in at the jury assembly room at 8:30 a.m. until they are released between 4 and 4:30 p.m.

The full term of service is one day a week for a month, although Valle said that jurors seldom show up for those four days without serving on a jury. On the busiest days of the week, Monday through Wednesday, the chances are about 80% that prospective jurors will be impaneled on a jury.

A certain number of jurors are placed on “phone alert.” They must report to court for a full day on their first day of service, but on remaining days they phone jury services between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. and if they are needed, they report to the courthouse at 1:30 p.m.

The Municipal Courts in Westminster, Fullerton and Santa Ana operate under the same system. In Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel, some jurors, after showing up for their first day of service, will be asked to phone in on subsequent days of their eligibility rather than actually appear at the courthouse. At Municipal Court in Newport Beach, jurors need not show up at all. They are, however, on call one day a week for a month and are given 45 minutes to arrive at the courthouse if they are called.

Taken together, Orange County’s courts call more jurors to service each year than those in every county in California save two: Los Angeles and San Diego. And until now, keeping track of jurors and potential jurors has been a ponderous task because the selection process, for the most part, has not been computerized.

However, Valle said, the system is expected to be streamlined with full computerization by 1992, and that will be a boon to jurors. When the computers take over, she said, the courts are expected to adopt a “one-day, one-trial” system of jury service, which is now in use in San Bernardino County. This means that a juror’s term of service lasts either one day (if he is not impaneled on a jury that day) or the length of one trial (if he is impaneled).

Once word of this reaches Los Angeles County, jurors there may grumble. There, the period of jury service is 10 consecutive days.

IN THE ASSEMBLY ROOM: The Waiting Game

Tedium reigns here. The jury assembly room is large and filled with rows of plastic chairs with small desk attachments and a few separate round tables surrounded by chairs. You can play cards or other games here, or drink coffee at 25 cents a cup, or watch television, or read (the magazine racks contain everything from Time to Welding Journal), or knit, or even sleep if you can do it sitting up. But mostly you wait.

On Day One of service, roll call is taken and each juror is assigned to a numbered panel containing 30 jurors. They are greeted by a Superior Court judge who gives them a cursory explanation of jury duty that takes on a bit of the air of a pep talk. He also opens the floodgates a crack by detailing a few valid excuses for getting out of jury duty.

Several people line up at the front desk to plead their cases.

“More than 50% of them try to get out of it,” Valle said. “A small percentage do not have a valid excuse, but most do. We get all kinds of silly requests that come through: people who say they have to take care of a pet at home, people saying that they absolutely can’t be away from their office.”

If they simply fail to show, they may be subject to a $250 fine or be required to make the day up at a later time, Valle said. The faithful who do show receive validated parking, a stipend of $5 a day, plus 15 cents a mile for gas. The checks are mailed after jury service ends.

Still, many people who are called to jury duty arrive with a head of steam already up.

“We have very irate individuals who come in,” Valle said. “We’ve had people walk right out on us. If they do, they get a nice little nasty reminder in the mail and they can also be called in and ordered to show cause. Some are found in contempt and some go to jail on weekends. Some get fines of up to $500.

“One thing we try to stress to everybody is that even their waiting here in the assembly room is not a waste of their time. They don’t realize what’s going on in the courtroom. Those judges and attorneys are trying to settle the case, so they’re not having to use them.”

At the end of first-day orientation, the new jurors are shown a video, narrated by actor Fess Parker, that explains the particulars of jury service in detail.

Then the waiting begins.

VOIR DIRE: The Whole Truth

On busy days, however, the waiting sometimes ends quickly and one or more panels are called to a particular courtroom to undergo the process of jury selection.

On a recent morning, four panels were summoned to Department 43, the courtroom of Judge F.P. Briseno. They were greeted by a smiling bailiff at the door, who said to one juror: “Your first day?”

“Yes, why?”

“You’re smiling, that’s why.”

They were collectively sworn to tell the truth during questioning and Briseno entered. He told them that the case to be tried was criminal, that it was expected to last from three to six weeks, and that it would likely run through a good part of the holiday season. He asked the jurors for whom the length of the trial would be a hardship. Most were quickly excused to return to the jury assembly room to wait for another call. A handful, whose excuses were more nebulous, were asked to wait “so I can talk to you some more.”

The 23 potential jurors who remained were then told that the case they may be asked to hear involved an alleged murder during the commission of a burglary. There were three defendants, all of whom could be sentenced to death if found guilty. Or, during the penalty phase of the trial, the jury could recommend life without the possibility of parole.

The defendants and their attorneys were in the courtroom, and as the enormity of the decision they might be asked to make began to register, the panel members looked at the defendants, and back to the judge, and their faces became set. One woman swallowed unusually hard.

Because it would be a capital case, Briseno said, the panelists would be interviewed individually by the judge and the attorneys. The process would take several days.

Usually, it doesn’t work that way. On civil, and most criminal cases, each juror is asked a series of questions relating to the case by the attorneys and the judge, to determine if they will likely be competent jurors. This process is called voir dire, literally, “to tell the truth.”

Voir dire can sometimes be a slow, tedious process. But it has been streamlined by the passage by California voters in June of Proposition 115, a court reform initiative born in Orange County that, among other things, allows judges to take control of questioning the panel, with limited input from the lawyers.

In capital cases, such as the one in Briseno’s courtroom, the judge, under Proposition 115, can also take control of the individual interviews, in which the panelists are quizzed about their views on capital punishment. Briseno, however, decided to go with the traditional judge/lawyer interview process.

Occasionally, Beacom said, potential jurors will try to squeak out of serving on a jury at this point.

“They try to get out of it when they have no legitimate excuse,” he said. “Some are very clever. They will create a personal problem that requires attention, and we can’t check out everything. We have to take it on faith. In a criminal case, for instance, they’ll say, ‘Hang the bastards!’ They pull that to get themselves excused. But I tell them that they’re on their honor, that I can only take their word for it.

“The tougher ones we get are when the people feel their work responsibilities are such that even though they’re compensated they might lose their place in line or that the whole operation’s going to collapse if they’re not there,” he said.

But many are excused. During voir dire, jurors can be thumbed out in two ways: for cause--meaning that the lawyers or the judge determine through questioning that the person would be an unfit juror (personal prejudice against the defendant or a personal friendship with one of the attorneys, for instance) or as a result of a peremptory challenge by one of the attorneys.

“We tell them to try to not take it personally,” Valle said. “It’s not meant as a personal affront in any way. But we do have people who come through the door who never get called.”

No reason need be given by attorneys when they excuse a juror using a peremptory challenge. It is among the first pieces of courtroom strategy jurors will see.

STRATEGY AND TRIAL: Looking for Ingredient X

“Obviously, the (panelists) who go immediately are those who come out and say that they have a problem with sitting on this kind of case, that they couldn’t be fair,” said Orange County public defender Ron Butler. “But I might think that that’s a pretty honest thing to say and I might just as soon keep them even though they say they can’t be fair. Once you get through the people who say they couldn’t be fair, then the difficulty sets in.”

What does an attorney look for in a juror? Honesty, intelligence, experience, integrity, decisiveness. Ingredient X.

“I like to look for people who have had a lot of experience in life,” Butler said. “People who have children, who may not tend to look at everything as absolutely black or white. The main thing is that they are pleasant and that they strike me as being sincere, as being someone who is capable of making a decision alone, an independent-type thinker.”

A person’s profession today is less of a consideration than in previous years when attorneys, police officers and clergy, among others, were automatically excluded from jury service. Police officers can serve on civil juries and attorneys can sit on civil and criminal cases.

Each attorney, Butler said, will try to fill the jury box with people whom they believe will be sympathetic to their respective cases.

“Up to a point,” Butler said, the prosecution will excuse those who seem to have an obvious liberal bent and the defense will kick off the John Birchers and people like that (through peremptory challenges). The attorneys tend to cancel each other out up to a point.”

The ultimate aim, Beacom said, is not to impanel a jury with no prejudices, but a jury that can make their prejudices subservient to the law.

“I think this is the guts of the whole process,” Beacom said. “We’ve all got prejudices and we shouldn’t kid ourselves about it. I point out to them that the law doesn’t demand the impossible. It doesn’t expect jurors to deny their own humanity or life experiences. It’s OK to make those kinds of judgments for yourself and your family and you can pursue them as vigorously as you want. There’s nothing un-American about it, nothing immoral about it. You don’t have to apologize to a soul. All the law demands is that you have the intellectual capacity to recognize who you are, what turns you on and turns you off, the kind of people you like and don’t like, and the ability to raise that to a conscious level and to exclude it from your thinking in terms of evaluating the merits of these people’s cases.

“What you do on your own time is your own business,” Beacom said. “What you do in here you do as an agent of your government, and when you’re about your government’s business you cannot indulge yourself in your own private prejudices and attitudes.”

The attorneys, however, are in the business of invoking emotion.

“You do play to the emotions of jurors,” Butler said, “especially when you don’t have the hard facts. They’re the ones you have to persuade. They’re the ones who are going to decide your client’s fate. If you’re trying a case in front of a judge, the approach is quite different, academic and less emotional.”

And, he said, the greater the stakes--as in a murder trial, for instance--the greater the emotional appeal.

“In cases like that,” he said, “I think the emotional part of the case could have a real impact on the jury’s decision.”

Still, Butler said he believes that jurors make a great effort to follow the law.

“With so many people, the only contact they’ve had with a jury trial has been on TV where there’s a lot of drama and humor and it’s not real and they’re not participating. Once they’re in the courtroom and see the seriousness of the jury selection and how careful everybody appears to be in performing their tasks, it impresses them quite a bit. They say, ‘Whoa, this is serious stuff.’ ”

That’s what Dennis Greer thought. Greer, 46, an insurance claims manager from Garden Grove, recently completed his term of jury duty at Superior Court--his first jury duty ever--and sat on a jury in a burglary trial.

“It’s not high drama,” he said. “It can be extremely boring. But I think everyone was very serious about it. I think people were sober about putting someone away for a period of time. They weren’t afraid to vote guilty and they weren’t afraid to vote not guilty. But they wanted to make sure either way that they were doing the right thing by the individual being charged, and by the state.”

The defendant, he said, was found guilty.

“You kind of feel like, wow, me? Do they really want me to do this?” said Beverly Thomas, 63, a retired payroll and accounting worker from Buena Park. “It’s a little overwhelming, but when I got into the case I figured that I was intelligent enough that I would handle it.”

Thomas served as an alternate juror on a murder/rape case. The defendant was found guilty.

Joyce Perrah, a secretary from La Habra, ended her jury duty without serving on a jury. She was challenged off several of them, including a murder/rape case.

“I think my first reaction was that I didn’t want to be responsible for someone else’s life,” she said. “The other part was that I felt that he was arrested because there was some kind of evidence that he was guilty. Because the defendant is sitting there, I think it’s an issue with jurors because you can’t help but think he could be guilty. But we can only be who we are. We all have our prejudices; we can’t get past that. We have to do the best we can.”

DELIBERATIONS: Serious Business

When the attorneys finish their closing arguments, the judge instructs the jury on the particular points of law that apply to the case and tells them that they must make their decision based on those points. The jury then retires to a separate room, elects a foreman who will moderate their deliberations, and discussion begins.

During deliberations, as throughout the entire trial, jurors are enjoined from talking to anyone else about the case. In unusually well-publicized cases, such as the Randy Steven Kraft murder trial, jurors may be sequestered so as not to be influenced by news reports of the trial.

Jurors are taken to lunch together in the Superior Court cafeteria during the time they are deliberating, to lessen the chance of outside influence.

Greer said the deliberations in which he participated were “very informal. We kind of sat around the table and most people didn’t know how to get started. We decided to pick a foreman who had had jury duty before. No one was really anxious to do it, but one man stepped forward and volunteered. Then we went around the table and took turns and everyone sort of gave their thoughts on the defense presentation and the state’s presentation of the case and where they were impressed and weren’t impressed with all the witnesses.

“After going around the room once we were all pretty much of a mind that the fellow was guilty. So we decided to take a secret ballot vote and all 12 votes came back guilty. We formalized that into a second vote and the foreman took down the verdict.”

The deliberations, Greer said, took 30 minutes.

It isn’t always so quick, or easy. Sometimes, Butler said, jurors find they sympathize with a party in the case, but find that they must rule against that person in order to uphold the law. There can be regrets, and lost sleep.

“Some do lose sleep,” Butler said. “It can be a very stressful experience, particularly when you’re talking about the really serious cases--especially the serious cases that are close.

“The cases I’ve tried over the years have been fairly serious felonies, and my impression has been that (the jurors) are very serious about their task. In a number of cases jurors have expressed to me after the trial that they would never want to sit on a jury again. It was too emotional for them.”

Still, the jury system continues to enjoy wide support, largely based on the phenomenon, seen repeatedly by lawyers, judges, other legal professionals--and fellow jurors--of ordinary people rising to an extraordinary occasion. It can be an unsettling idea to trust a life or lives to the judgment of 12 strangers, but the legal community believes in those strangers.

To Beacom, such a tendency to possibly feel one way and vote another “demonstrates a willingness in lay people to follow the law. I’ve had a number of jurors come back and say that they had no appreciation for the judicial process until given a case just like that. It’s not all peaches and cream.”

How It Works

More than 170,000 residents are summoned each year to jury duty in Orange County’s five Municipal Court branches and its Superior Court--more than any other county in the state except Los Angeles and San Diego. On the average residents over 18 are asked to serve once every two years for a one-month term. Here are the steps to becoming a juror:

1) After random selection from registered voter and/or Department of Motor Vehicles rolls, prospective jurors receive a summons in the mail.

2) On their first day, jurors go through a one-hour orientation in the jury assembly room and are assigned to a particular panel (30 jurors to each panel). At this time, if they feel they have a valid excuse for not serving, they speak to the jury services staff about it and they are either excused immediately or their request is denied.

3) Most jurors eventually will be called to a courtroom by panel, where the judge and the attorneys will question them (a process called voir dire ) to determine whether they will likely be good jurors in the case. They may be excused for a variety of reasons reasons.

4) If they survive the voir dire process, 12 jurors and two or more alternate jurors (who do not participate in deliberations) are empaneled and the trial begins.

5) After the attorneys’ closing arguments, the judge instructs the jury on the points of law in the case and the jurors retire to deliberate. The alternate jurors are excused.

6) The jurors select one of their number as the foreman, who will act as moderator during deliberations.

7) The jurors return a verdict and are excused. If their designated term of jury duty is not yet over, they return to the jury assembly room for possible assignment to another trial.

MANY ARE CALLED, FEW ARE CHOSEN

Listed below for each Orange County court are the number of people who were summoned for jury duty (sent notices in the mail) and the number of sworn (impanelled) jurors in 1989:

Court Summoned Sworn Central Court (includes Superior 83,208 7,320 and Municipal Courts) Harbor Municipal Court 20,341 994 South Municipal Court 7,200 715 West Municipal Court 31,100 2,296 North Municipal Court 28,900 2,099

* Any Orange County resident who is over 18 years old and a U.S. citizen can be called to jury duty.

* A person is asked to serve on a jury once every two years on average.

* The term of service is one day a week for one month. If a person is called to serve on a Monday, he must report for service each Monday of that month. If the person serves as a juror and the trial is shorter than one week, that person must report again on the following Monday and every other Monday left in the month.

* The average length of service is seven days.

* Those who report for jury service are paid $5 a day for service and 15 cents a mile on a one-way basis, from their house to the courthouse.

Source: Orange County Superior Court, jury commissioner’s office; Harbor Municipal Court and South Municipal Court.

GETTING OUT OF JURY DUTY

SOME VALID EXCUSES . . . Employer won’t pay for time served on jury duty. Prospective juror is self-employed in a one-person business and would have to close down the business during jury duty. Physical or mental incapacity. The person must care for small children or sick dependents at home. Extremely difficult transportation or travel conditions. The person must travel out of the area weekly on business. The services of the person are immediately needed for protection of public health and safety. The person has served as a trial juror or grand juror in any state or federal court during the past year.

. . . AND SOME NOT SO VALID EXCUSES “I am too incompetent to serve, plus I take care of my two grandchildren for my working daughter.” “Can’t do jury duty because I don’t read good and when I read I get nervous and have to take a breath.” “Please excuse me because a friend of my boyfriend’s sister is a police officer.” “Sorry, but I don’t speak or read English well.” (This person was a postal worker who had lived in Orange County for 15 years.)

Researched by KATHIE BOZANICH / Los Angeles Times