Grand Juries’ Racial Makeup Under Challenge : Legal system: L.A. County’s mostly Anglo volunteer panels do not reflect the population, lawyers contend. Other areas have changed systems to increase diversity.

The case was not the kind usually associated with a civil rights issue: A group of men and women were accused of staging auto accidents around Los Angeles in a $25-million insurance fraud.

But when attorneys for eight defendants scrutinized the way the charges were brought--through a grand jury--they came up with just that type of legal challenge.

Although the eight were Latinos, the 23-member grand jury that indicted them in 1990 was nearly all Anglos: It had one Asian-American, one Latino and no African-Americans.

In contrast, the 1990 census showed that Los Angeles County was only 40% Anglo, with 38% of the population Latino, 11% African-American, 10% Asian and 1% other.

“What you get is essentially tokenism,” complained Charles L. Lindner, one of the defense attorneys who moved for dismissal of the charges on the grounds that the “overwhelmingly white” grand jury pool was unconstitutional.

The racial composition of trial juries, which decide innocence or guilt in the courtroom, has long been a hotly contested issue. Attorneys fight over who will sit on them and, in sensitive, cases--such as the Rodney G. King or Reginald O. Denny beating trials--spectators invariably do a racial head count of who is selected, assuming it will make a difference.

In Los Angeles County, however, little attention has been paid to the largely secretive grand juries, which are appointed by Superior Court judges for yearlong terms to serve essentially as civil watchdogs, investigating government agencies and issuing reports.

But almost overnight, a statewide proposition approved by voters in 1990 accelerated the use of another grand jury power--that of issuing criminal indictments.

Under Proposition 115, if defendants are charged under the grand jury process, there is no need to hold a subsequent preliminary hearing in court. With prosecutors welcoming the opportunity to avoid those proceedings--which are almost mini-trials--grand jury indictments jumped statewide, from 20 in 1989 to 540 last year.

Then, defense attorneys around California began to challenge the composition of grand juries. The insurance fraud case, People vs. Vela, is one of at least five pending in Los Angeles Superior Court. With two challenges in Orange County, and one each in Riverside County and Marin County, the issue is headed for certain appellate review.

Los Angeles Superior Court judges, who select grand jurors here, say there has been no discrimination, and point out increased efforts to recruit minorities.

“We have made some substantial outreach efforts,” said Cecil Mills, supervising judge of the Superior Court criminal division.

The county’s current grand jury is mostly Anglo (15 of its 23 members) but also includes one Latino, one Asian-American and six African-Americans.

Prosecutors note that higher courts have upheld the system used to pick grand jurors, and some discount the current challenges as a tactic used by defense lawyers to delay trials.

“It’s the motion du jour, “ said Anthony Colannino, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney who has fought the Vela case motion.

But two California counties, San Diego and Santa Barbara, have changed their grand jury system after similar challenges. For criminal cases, they now use second grand juries made up of people randomly selected from the regular trial jury pools. At least eight other counties also have adopted that procedure without a formal push from defense attorneys.

“It ensures we have a cross-section that reflects the community and, therefore, eliminates challenges,” said San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith.

As in much of the United States, grand jury indictments were common in California until 1978, when the state Supreme Court ruled that defendants in those cases were entitled to preliminary hearings. Prosecutors then generally bypassed the grand jury by filing criminal complaints themselves and presenting their evidence to judges at the “prelims.”

Although the 1990 initiative made it easier to use grand juries again, the vast majority of cases are not brought that way. There were only 50 indictments returned last year in Los Angeles County, although an estimated 70,000 felony complaints were filed by the district attorney.

Prosecutors seek the indictments primarily in complicated, multi-defendant fraud or conspiracy cases--allowing them to avoid lengthy preliminary hearings--or in high-profile cases, such as that of Heidi Fleiss, the accused Hollywood madam.

Defense attorneys say a perception of fairness is important even if race is not an issue in the crime involved, as in the insurance fraud case handled by Lindner. Race, however, has been in the forefront of some of the most sensitive cases before grand juries: the 1991 beating of King, for instance, which led to the indictment of four white police officers--but none of the others at the scene.

The debate centers on the selection process.

“If you’re going to have a grand jury doing indicting, it should (not) be . . . handpicked, white, retired people selected by judges,” said Marshall M. Schulman, a defense attorney challenging the Orange County indictment of Robert Chien-Nan Chan, one of four youths accused in the murder of student Stuart Tay. Despite the growing Asian population in Orange County, only one Asian has been selected for a grand jury pool in the last five years.

Unlike regular trial jurors, who are summoned to duty from voter registration or motor vehicle records, grand jurors serve voluntarily.

In Los Angeles, Orange and a number of other counties, court officials say they try to attract applicants through public announcements, letters or contacts with community or service groups. The problem, they say, is finding people who can leave their job for a year (in Los Angeles, the grand jurors meet almost every weekday) or live on the $25-a-day pay.

After interviews, volunteers’ names are placed in a pool with those of people nominated by judges. This year, judges nominated 109 out of the 183 people placed in the Los Angeles pool.

Lindner, at a hearing challenging a murder indictment against a black defendant, argued that the system is flawed because the county’s judges are predominantly Anglo, and so are the juror pools. Over a period of several years, he said, more members of the Los Angeles County pool came from “rural, bucolic Canyon Country 50 miles from Civic Center than from south and east Los Angeles County.”

“This community isn’t white,” Lindner said. “This is a way for a minority to maintain control over a population in which whites have a diminishing population support.”

But Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders rejected the challenge.

“It is not the racial makeup of the judges of the Superior Court but the difficulty in locating people willing to serve,” Pounders said. “. . . Those who could not afford to live on $25 a day would be excluded. That does not mean it’s minorities that are excluded.”

In the Vela case, Judge George W. Trammell said the grand jury panel need not mirror the county’s ethnic makeup. “It is literally trying to compare apples with oranges,” he said in a written ruling, because legal requirements for grand jury service sharply reduce the number of people eligible.

Grand jurors must be 18 or over, U.S. citizens, residents of their county for at least one year, and possess sufficient knowledge of English to participate.

Trammell said the eligible Latino population, based on the 1990 census, dropped by more than half, to 16%, when he took into account age, citizenship and the large number describing themselves as speaking English not “very well.”

Defense lawyers said they will appeal.

“No whites have ever been subjected to an English language requirement to speak ‘very well,’ ” Lindner said.

Many defense attorneys support the use of second grand juries, drawn from trial jury pools, for criminal cases. Under this system--allowed by a 1991 state law--counties make service easier by impaneling the jurors for periods ranging from a few days to three months, but not for a year.

The California counties that have adopted it, including Riverside, San Bernardino and several in the Bay Area, are following what is accepted practice elsewhere in the United States, according to David Kairys, a Temple University Law School professor and an expert on juries. The Los Angeles or Orange County selection system, he said, “would have been common in the 1940s or ‘50s, to some extent in the ‘60s. It’s unusual these days.”

Los Angeles court officials have so far rejected use of second grand juries partly out of concern over the expense. They also question whether it would be feasible to conduct criminal background checks--now part of the county’s screening of grand jurors--if people served for only short periods.

“It’s important to be able to maintain the integrity of the system. If you don’t do background investigations, you start ending up with a bunch of felons,” Mills said.

Another problem with second grand juries in Los Angeles, he said, is “lack of space. Where do you have them sit? We have no facility to have another 23 people. . . . I don’t think the county is going to build us a hall.”

Building a Jury A racial and ethnic profile of the Los Angeles County Grand Jury--and the pool used to select its members--shows that grand jurors still are predominantly Anglo. But efforts to diversify the panel have produced some changes. The jurors are selected by Superior Court judges. Prospective jurors apply or are nominated by judges. Qualified applicants are placed in a pool, with the 23 jurors drawn by lottery.

GRAND JURY POOL

90-91 91-92 92-93 93-94 Asians 2 6 4 4 Blacks 11 20 23 31 Anglos 103 134 128 126 Latinos 4 18 13 17 Others 0 0 7 1 No response 1 0 0 4

*SWORN JURORS

90-91 91-92 92-93 93-94 Asians 1 0 0 1 Blacks 0 2 3 6 Anglos 21 21 17 15 Latinos 1 0 2 1 Others 0 0 0 0 No response 0 0 1 0

Source: Los Angeles County