Critics Take Note: Juror Abuse Isn’t Due to Lack of Funds

Some of my readers complained that my recent criticism of the jury system was superficial. A few said I didn’t understand that the main reason jurors are mistreated is because the courts are overburdened and short of funds.

After my own time on a jury panel in the Downtown Los Angeles courthouse, I’d written that jurors were herded about like cattle, subjected to poor working conditions and forced to spend their 10 days of service under the old Army rule of “hurry up and wait.”

So I came to the Capitol to ask an expert about what my critics were saying. He’s Phil Isenberg, chairman of the Assembly Judiciary Committee. Since 1990, Isenberg has been leading the effort to reform a state court system designed in frontier days.

Isenberg is a smart attorney and former mayor of Sacramento with a quality increasingly rare in politics: a sense of humor.

When he was elected to the Assembly, he wanted to take a break from law and local government, and immersed himself in the budget, water issues and education. But in 1990, Speaker Willie Brown appointed him Judiciary Committee chairman. To his surprise, Isenberg got interested in court reform, a subject too dreary for most lawmakers. “My fatal flaw is that I can get interested in anything,” Isenberg said.

I told Isenberg that my critics complained that I failed to understand that the courts are broke. He laughed. “The courts are well-funded,” he said. “But they think that if they don’t get everything they want, they are being punished. If they had cuts like welfare or schools, they’d faint.”

He showed me a report prepared in 1992 for the state’s top judge, Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas of the state Supreme Court. The report, by Michigan State University professor John H. Hudzik, found that California court expenditures grew by more than 13% in the 1980s, compared to 5% for law enforcement.

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In his job as Judiciary Committee chairman, Isenberg went to work to make the courts more efficient.

He understood that their operation has a life-and-death impact on the way we live. Crowded, inefficient courts, with clogged calendars, mean more plea bargaining between prosecutors and defense attorneys, more criminals able to bargain for lighter sentences in exchange for guilty pleas. This means that more violent criminals walk the streets.

The courts, he learned, were like the Balkans in that each of the state’s 58 counties has a fiercely independent court system. This is a relic of early California, when it took many days to travel by horseback from one county to another. Today, some of these court systems are deeply into reform--consolidating work, speeding along trials, cutting red tape and computerizing. Others balked at change. Los Angeles County has been one of the most recalcitrant.

Isenberg, backed by Gov. Pete Wilson, pushed through new laws increasing state financial support of the courts, but also telling them to shape up and put an end to the antiquated system of maintaining separate Superior and Municipal court systems that basically do the same work.

Los Angeles County’s presiding judge of the Superior Court, Ricardo Torres, resisted. “Judge Torres delayed efficiencies for a year,” Isenberg said.

But change began when Torres was replaced as presiding judge by someone just as committed to reform as Isenberg, Superior Court Judge Robert Mallano. “He has a good sense of humor, he doesn’t take himself seriously, he is committed to change, but his colleagues trust him,” Isenberg said.

Mallano has become a pivotal figure in the reform movement. He has swung the reluctant L.A. system behind the most important proposal, imposing budget controls on the courts. The L.A. judges had resisted this, contending that when elected politicians try to control the judicial budget, it weakens the independence of the judiciary, a separate branch of government.

To meet the judges’ concerns about a loss of independence, Isenberg proposed that the priorities be recommended by the judges’ own statewide governing body, the Judicial Council. Mallano became co-chair of the Judicial Council committee that recommended the priorities.

The double-digit yearly increases of the 1980s have been halted, largely because of the reforms. Last year, court operations went up by just 2.5%.

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So it’s not money that’s to blame for the hardships imposed on jurors--the inadequate phone system, the crowded facilities, the long waits.

The courts had been well-financed during the booming 1980s. Even today, funding is increasing, although at a much more restrained pace. The limited dollars are going further than in the past. The courts are beginning to spend more efficiently.

I’d have to pin the blame somewhere else in the courthouse--with its hallways full of defendants and plaintiffs, prosecutors and defense lawyers and, those at the bottom of the judicial pyramid, the jurors. Perhaps that lowly status, the fact that jurors are treated with indifference, was the reason all along.