O.C. Grand Jury Lacks Diversity, Critics Say : Backlash: Panel that urged immigration ban is called bastion of conservative older residents. Changes demanded.

Under fire from Latino groups for drafting a report advocating a moratorium on all immigration to the United States, the Orange County Grand Jury is now being criticized as a bastion of conservative-thinking older residents who do not reflect the area’s growing ethnic diversity.

Local immigrant rights leaders, shocked by the recent grand jury report linking illegal immigration to a wide range of society’s ills, are demanding changes in the way jurors are selected to serve yearlong terms as watchdogs of county government operations and reviewers of criminal evidence.

“Who is this Grand Jury?” asked John Palacio, Orange County leadership program director for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “They do not reflect the diversity of Orange County for people of color.

“This is a reflection of a body that’s on a political mission,” he said. “It’s not just the makeup of the current grand jury but the whole selection process. There is something inherently wrong.”

The call for increased diversity has also been joined by a local criminal defense attorney, who is seeking to overturn an indictment against an Asian client based on the grand jury’s lack of racial diversity. The situation amounts to “institutional racism,” said attorney Marshall M. Schulman.

The issues outlined by Schulman and the immigrant rights advocates are troubling even to officials involved in the recruitment of grand jury members. They admit that the inherent structure of grand jury service--which often demands five-day workweeks--hinders the participation of younger citizens and immigrants of all voting ages, whom officials say have been difficult to reach.

“I think you’ll find that very often we’re talking about a group with a limited philosophy,” concedes Ginger Reed of the Grand Jurors Assn. of Orange County. “It’s the exclusive domain of retired people. We have to be realistic about that.”

Pat Hill, assistant executive officer for the Orange County Superior Court, said finding minorities for the grand jury is a top priority.

Each year, nearly 7,000 mailers go out to a variety of Orange County community and minority groups to solicit grand jury applicants. Court officials issue announcements on radio and television and in newspapers. But so far they have had little success attracting people of color.

“At least 10 months out of the year I beg and plead for applicants everywhere I go,” Hill said. “In our opinion, to project an image of fairness, the grand jury needs to represent the community but that has never been easy. We never stop looking.”

Statistics show that the average age of the current grand jury is 61. It is composed of 17 Anglos and two Latinos. The new grand jury, scheduled to be sworn in Thursday, will have an average age of 64 and will include 15 Anglos, two Latinos, one African-American and one American Indian.

Previous grand juries have been demographically similar, said Hill, who added that the total number of minorities applying for grand jury service has remained relatively stable but the court is seeing an increased number of Asian applicants.

According to the 1990 U.S. Census, Orange County is 64.5% Anglo, 23.4% Latino, 10% Asian and 1.6% African-American.

The 1991-92 grand jury included one African-American, but no Latino or Asian members among its 19 members, said the panel’s foreman, James Burton.

“It’s not because (recruiters) don’t try,” Burton said, adding that it has been difficult to find younger, working people and minorities, particularly Asians, willing to apply for the posts, which pay $25 for each day the grand jury meets.

“I think it’s a pity. It’s possible that minorities or young people don’t have the ability to take the financial hit.”

A more diverse group on this year’s panel, critics claim, would have issued an analysis of local immigration with dramatically different conclusions. In a report published June 16, the grand jury recommended a three-year moratorium on all immigration to the United States and linked the influx of illegal immigrants with the overcrowding of schools and housing, the spread of infectious disease and the county’s failure to win the drug war.

Most startling of all the findings, however, was the call for a three-year moratorium on all immigration, which the local grand jury has no authority to either recommend or enforce, officials have said.

Local civil-rights attorney Christopher B. Mears said the need for racial diversity on the grand jury is underscored by the report.

“I have no way of knowing whether the grand jurors are bigoted, but this report is indicative of that kind of narrow thinking,” said Mears, who also questioned the jury’s intent when it took on a national issue far beyond its scope.

“Why would they do this? It’s a gratuitous slap at immigrants, without any thought as to what might be the positive impact of immigration,” Mears said. “It’s a detestable document that seems to be reflective of a basic lack of understanding.”

It is critical to have minority representation on grand juries, especially when criminal indictments are involved, said UCLA law professor Peter Arenella.

Grand juries are often seen as “rubber stamps” for the prosecution--thus the old joke that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, Arenella said.

“Let’s say a prosecutor wants to whitewash a police brutality case. An all-white, older, affluent jury that sees police officers as the last line between themselves and chaos might decide not to indict. Minorities on that same jury would say, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” he said.

Supervising Deputy Dist. Atty. Guy Ormes said his office has increasingly turned to the grand jury for criminal indictments because it saves court time and resources. In the past two years, criminal indictments returned by the grand jury have more than doubled from 35 indictments in the 1991-92 fiscal year to 74 in the 1992-93 fiscal year.

Ormes, who said he believes the court recruits a fair cross-section of Orange County residents for grand jury service, said he disagrees with the critics.

“It’s difficult to find people who want to serve,” Ormes said. “If we did not believe the grand jury represented Orange County, we wouldn’t use it.”

Tom Dalton, a jury member who co-chaired the committee that authored the report, has said that the panel stands strongly behind its findings. Dalton has said repeatedly that the report was an expression of overwhelming frustration with the nation’s border policy. It was not, he said, an attempt to “bash any group of people.”

“I don’t think there is any racial bias,” Dalton said. “Our job was to get the facts together.”

Grand jury member Joe Chavez, a Latino who helped compile the report, said he had initial reservations about embarking on such a study but was later convinced of its potential value in showing that illegal immigration has an economic impact on the county.

“I think we succeeded to some extent,” Chavez said. “I think (the critics) just didn’t read what was in there. Their reaction was unfortunate.”

Palacio is among a coalition of Latino and Asian leaders who are demanding that the grand jury be censured and now plan to use the controversial report as a major exhibit in their case for creating more opportunities for minorities to serve on future panels.

Palacio and representatives of the Hispanic Bar Assn. of Orange County, League of United Latin American Citizens and the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc. have vowed to take their demands to Superior Court Judge Michael Brenner, who oversees grand jury operations. Brenner is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.

“Orange County has dramatically changed in population,” said Mai Cong, president of the Vietnamese community group. “We will voice our concerns to the judge and let him know that we are here. It’s not only the Vietnamese community that is concerned but also Chinese and Japanese communities. We would like to have a mix of people on the jury, including new immigrants.”

Cong was also particularly critical of the grand jury’s immigration study, saying that its results were tantamount to spreading an anti-American sentiment.

“This country was developed by immigrants,” she said. “This country, which is recognized as a superpower, is built by immigrants.”

In recruiting potential grand jurors, the court uses newspapers, radio and television announcements, and Hill often spends her evenings speaking to community organizations to solicit applicants. Judges and court staff are urged to be on the lookout for prospective jurors, she said.

In Orange County, the number of potential members is narrowed in a particularly involved selection process that demands formal application, background checks and personal interviews. Names are then drawn at random from a pool of approved finalists.

Once impaneled, members often meet every weekday during the 12-month term.

The coalition of immigrant rights groups has taken aim at the entire selection process, claiming that its regimented structure has made minority participation difficult.

Specifically, the advocates say, the time commitment can be too demanding on minorities--and Anglos--who have not yet retired and must work each day.

Attorney Betty Yamashiro, president of the Orange County Japanese-American Lawyers Assn., questioned whether the county could turn to part-time service for grand jurors.

She said the county could impanel a grand jury that would serve a shorter term and hear only criminal matters, an option that some defense attorneys would favor, or utilize the traditional jury pool that is typically more diverse. But Hill said establishing a second grand jury would cost too much.

“I don’t think anyone can object to better minority representation, but minorities are apparently not applying,” Yamashiro said.

As part of a pending court case, defense attorney Schulman plans to argue that the absence of minority jury members led to the 1992 indictment of a group of mostly Asian men and women charged in one of the state’s largest auto insurance fraud schemes. The case is pending in Orange County Superior Court.

Schulman is also considering an attempt to overturn an indictment in the case of Asian teen-ager Robert Chan, who is the accused ringleader in the New Year’s Eve slaying of Foothill High School honor student Stuart A. Tay.

“Their method of picking grand jurors has proven to be institutional racism,” Schulman said. “A defendant is entitled to be indicted or not be indicted by a racially mixed jury.”

Schulman said he is also disturbed about procedures for picking jurors. He believes that background checks performed by the Orange County district attorney’s office could produce panels that would be more sympathetic to the prosecution’s position. In San Diego County, for example, county marshals perform the background checks.

But Hill said Schulman’s theory is “just wrong, wrong, wrong. The background checks are just to determine whether these people have been convicted or have anything in their backgrounds that we need to know about. It’s entirely fact-based, nothing subjective about it.”

Meanwhile, publication of the immigration report last week has been followed by strong reaction from groups sharply critical of its conclusions and from those wildly supportive of its findings.

“It is vitally important that the American people are aware of the effects of uncontrolled immigration,” said Danielle Elliott, the Los Angeles coordinator for the Federation of American Immigration Reform.

“It is only through reports like this one that the public is kept informed. The grand jury’s call for a moratorium is not only responsible, it is important to urge a pause in immigration. . . . The system is broken, and a moratorium is the way to fix it.”

The jurors themselves have been extraordinarily outspoken in defending their position as well. To the surprise of some, four jurors were the guests last Monday of ultraconservative Los Angeles radio host George Putnam.

During the program, a station spokesman said, the jury members won many plaudits from the listening audience, which overwhelmingly believed government services have been drained by the influx of immigrants.

But even Reed, chairman of the Grand Jury Assn., which is composed of former grand jury members, said the report has the potential to seriously tar the local institution’s reputation as an unbiased investigative unit, open to concerns of all residents regardless of their ethnicities.

“It was an inappropriate thing to do,” Reed said, adding that the panel brought little expertise to the task and acted outside its authority. “I don’t like to see juries do things that are inappropriate. What they did will likely taint the new grand jury with Latino groups.”

Burton, last year’s foreman, said that his panel declined a request to study the costs of providing government services to illegal immigrants. He said the request came to the jury from an Orange County supervisor, whom he declined to identify.

“It would have required that we study a lot of data that I don’t think exists,” he said.

Burton said that while he “admired the courage” of the current grand jury, he believed it was not the grand jury’s role to make recommendations on policy that is not under its domain.

“They are a bunch of ordinary citizens,” Burton said.

Grand Jury Discontent

Local ethnic minority legal activists have criticized the racial composition of the Orange County Grand Jury. Here is the ethnic breakdown of the 19-member juries for 1991-92, 1992-93 and incoming 1993-94: 1991-92 White: 18 Black: 1 1992-93 (current jury) White: 17 Latino: 2 1993-94 (takes office July 1) White: 15 Latino: 2 Black: 1 American Indian: 1 Sources: Orange County Superior Court; grand jury foreman