1st of New Courtrooms Brings Safety, but Also Concerns About Juries : Van Nuys: A locked glass chamber is meant to stymie violence. Critics say moving death-penalty cases from downtown will affect balance on panels.

When the first of four criminal courtrooms being transferred from downtown to Van Nuys opens today, it will bring with it heightened security and an ongoing controversy over the makeup of juries.

The new courtrooms in Van Nuys Superior Court, which has eight existing criminal trial courtrooms, will be used primarily to relieve a backlog of 130 death-penalty cases awaiting trial in Los Angeles County, court officials say.

Many cases will involve drive-by shootings, court officials say, and rival gang members are expected to attend both as spectators and witnesses.

To handle such potentially volatile situations, one of the newly remodeled courtrooms has a floor-to-ceiling glass wall where a low, wooden railing would normally separate spectators from lawyers, defendants and court officials.

In addition, witnesses and lawyers going from the spectator area to the front of the courtroom must pass through a glass-walled, six-foot-square “sally port”--the first of its kind in the county, according to Superior Court Judge Alan B. Haber, presiding judge of Van Nuys Superior Court.

This chamber, which has a door at either end, is designed to prevent anyone rushing forward to harm court officials or defendants, or to aid in a defendant’s escape.

Sheriff’s Deputy Doug Hammer, bailiff in the high-security courtroom, controls two remote switches that unlock the doors.

“Once the person or persons is inside” the chamber, Hammer said, “I lock the door behind them and then I unlock the next door.”

The courtroom is also equipped with two video cameras that allow deputies in their first-floor headquarters to monitor spectators.

Although it hasn’t protested the heightened security, the Los Angeles County public defender’s office, which represents most low-income defendants, has objected to switching death-penalty cases from downtown to Van Nuys because the juries would be drawn from the San Fernando Valley.

Assistant Public Defender Michael P. Judge termed it the equivalent of taking residents of “Granada Hills or Encino and trying them in Compton.”

The public defender’s office is planning to appeal to federal court as soon as a case is transferred to Van Nuys that has “all the elements that we would contest,” Judge said.

In a failed effort to dissuade the judges who administer the courts from making the switch, the public defender’s office compiled statistics indicating that jury pools downtown and in Compton are 21% black and that Van Nuys’ pool is 6% black.

Latinos make up 16% of jurors downtown, 11% in Compton and 8% in Van Nuys, according to Judge, second in command in the public defender’s office.

David Meyer, also an assistant public defender, said that although recent court decisions have increased a judge’s flexibility in assigning cases to be tried in areas other than where the crime was committed, “that doesn’t mean they can send them anywhere, as we interpret the law.”

The right to a trial by one’s peers “doesn’t mean that all the jurors have to be clones of the defendant,” Meyer said. “But they have to reasonably represent the community in which the crime was committed.”

The public defender’s office also objects to forcing witnesses and defendants from South-Central Los Angeles to travel to Van Nuys for trials, Meyer said.

“We’ve calculated that for some people, it would mean four different buses,” he said.

The Superior Court presiding judges, however, have dismissed the complaints from defense lawyers, saying they have researched the law and found it supports the move.

The presiding judges “transfer cases around the county all the time” to smooth out the flow of cases, said Judge Gary Klausner, who supervises criminal courts throughout the county.