Something’s Wrong When Jurors Are Treated Like Inmates

On Wednesday, I was sitting on the floor outside a courtroom, a prisoner of the criminal justice system.

I hadn’t done anything wrong, except answer my jury summons. But as a friend once said, after suffering the indignities heaped upon jurors, “I’d rather go to prison than be on jury duty.”

One of my fellow jury pool inmates Wednesday echoed that thought. “They treat the jurors as bad as the people who are charged,” he said.

We were outside Department 107 in the Downtown Criminal Courts Building. We and a couple of dozen other prospective jurors had been summoned from our home base, the 11th-floor jury assembly room, to the courtroom on the 9th floor where a trial was about to begin.

The building itself was an obstacle course. It appears serviceable from the outside, a square-shaped, 19-story structure with the windows indented in a way that resembles an egg carton. But the inside is crumbling from the strain of housing an overcrowded criminal justice system. We waited at every step in the process, from the slow elevators, which have never worked right, to the long line at the metal detector.

When we finally arrived at the courtroom, a man came out and said: “We need you back here at 11:15.” After killing an hour, we assembled in the hallway again. Jurors from other courtrooms also massed in the area, far too many for the benches to hold. About 30 of us ended up either standing or sitting on the floor. Finally, at 11:45 a.m., we were led into Department 107.

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I knew it would be like this when I received my jury summons in the mail a few weeks before.

November was a pretty busy month at work, so I called the number on the summons to ask for a delay. The line was busy. I tried again and again and again. After an hour, I realized what scores of lobbyists and lawyers have known for years--you can’t get anything done in government unless you put in the fix.

I called a friend at the county and asked if he knew a secret number that would get me through. He gave me one and I called. “How did you get this number?” said an outraged voice at the other end of the line. “I just got it,” I replied, declining to reveal my source.

He gave me a new starting date, last Wednesday. In my previous jury duties, I once endured 10 days in the depressing basement of the Torrance court. On another tour, I hadn’t complained about having to fight my way through drug dealers and panhandlers to get to the Hollywood court. But this time, I decided things were going to be different. I was going to have the last word--and have it in print.

In the interest of fairness, I thought I would first get the court’s side of why jury duty has become such dismal business. So, two days before my jury duty began, I visited the presiding judge of the Superior Court, Robert Millano, and told him my gripes.

Millano is a friendly, intense man who graduated from Yale and Boalt Hall, the law school at UC Berkeley, before going into private practice in Los Angeles. He has been a judge since 1978, and is now serving a two-year term as chief judge.

He was sympathetic to my complaints. I told him about the constantly busy phone. He said his wife had the same trouble when she was on jury duty. “There’s really no excuse for that,” he said. “You can’t treat jurors as cattle. They’re not a commodity. We’re responsible for those people.”

If he couldn’t do anything about it, I wondered, who could? I made a note to myself to learn more about the phone system.

Millano, like anyone who’s trapped in a bureaucracy, indicated that he found it hard, if not impossible, to change things. “When I was supervising judge in Torrance, I was trying to swap the law library for the jury assembly room, which was in the basement,” Millano said. “The law library people said: ‘We don’t want to put the books down there. The pipes might break and they’ll get wet.’ I said: ‘You mean we should treat books better than people?’ I never got anywhere. I was just trying to improve the lot of the jurors. It was horrible. It was just horrible.”

As we talked I could see that a lot of my complaints were rooted in the slowness of the court system, by lawyers’ love of procedure, by long and often tedious questioning.

Millano said the judges are trying to speed things up. “We give courses to our judges in time management,” he said. “We start on time. We limit our recesses. We ascertain what is the feasible time for a lawyer to argue a case, and hold them to that time.” But he said such efforts conflict with a deeply ingrained culture “that lawyers could take as much time as they wanted. It was the culture of lawyers and judges.”

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The lawyers are a frustrating element. This is especially true during the process known as voir dire, when prospective jurors are questioned to determine their competence.

The attorneys are given a certain number of peremptory challenges, where they can throw you off a panel without giving a reason. Typically, a juror will sit through hours, even days, of voir dire questioning only to end up being rejected for the panel, often without apparent reason. My wife, for example, has been on jury duty four times and has never been selected for a jury.

By Wednesday afternoon, I made it to a jury panel, a pool of prospective jurors for a trial. It was a case I really wanted to be on, a double murder. But the prosecutor, exercising her first peremptory challenge, kicked me off without saying why.

I was disappointed. Good trials make the misery of serving on jury duty worthwhile. And nobody likes being rejected. I added lawyers to the list of complaints I was going to check out during my remaining days on jury duty.