Jury Pool Change Angers Lawyers in Orange County : Courts: Federal panels will be drawn from the county only instead of a larger area. Defense attorneys fear that all-white juries will judge minority defendants.

A new jury selection system that draws prospective federal jurors in Orange County from throughout the county but not neighboring areas has angered defense attorneys who complain that the change will further exclude blacks and lead to more all-white juries.

The change begins Sept. 5 at the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, where jurors for local federal trials will be selected exclusively from Orange County’s voter registration rolls. The jury pool no longer will include people from Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Court officials said the new system was prompted by the opening of a new federal court in Riverside and will make it more convenient for jurors because they no longer will have to travel long distances. The federal government, which routinely reimburses hotel and travel costs of jurors who travel long distances, will save money.

But defense attorneys say that they might challenge the constitutionality of the new system and that the change marks the second time in less than two years that court officials have cut the potential pool of minority jurors at the Santa Ana federal court.

“What we’re going to have is a [further] dramatic whitening of our jury pool,” said H. Dean Steward, who heads the federal public defender’s office here. “They’re taking away a diverse, multiethnic pool and replacing it with a system that’s not quite fair.”

In 1993, most criminal cases in federal court here were temporarily halted as defense attorneys unsuccessfully challenged a move that cut the Santa Ana federal jury pool from a seven-county region to the three counties of Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino. At the time, defense lawyers estimated the move resulted in the loss of almost 1 million potential black jurors.

Steward said the latest change will be particularly unfair to black defendants who are accused of committing crimes in Orange County or whose cases are sometimes transferred to the Santa Ana courthouse from Los Angeles.

“What they learned in high school about the right to be tried by a jury of their peers will be meaningless for these guys,” Steward said.

Blacks make up about 14% of 400 people represented each year by Steward’s office in Santa Ana, which handles 90% of criminal defendants here.

The potential pool of black jurors, residents 18 and older, is 2% of Orange County’s population, according to 1990 U.S. Census figures. Whites make up 68% of the jury pool, Latinos 21% and Asians 9%.

The ratio of potential black jurors is twice as high in the tri-county area, about 4% of the total population, census figures show.

Before the 1993 change, blacks made up 9% of potential jurors in the seven-county pool.

Prosecutor Jean Kawahara, who heads the U.S. attorney’s office in Santa Ana, said the new system is “fair and constitutional.”

Kawahara said selecting local jurors to try people accused of committing crimes in Orange County “is an appropriate pool.” She noted that the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling three months ago that upheld the the previous change to the federal jury pool.

But Steward said the latest change will make a big difference.

“Once we make the switch, the few minorities we had will disappear,” Steward said. “It will be like Orange County juries [in state courts] which are virtually all white.”

C. Thomas McDonald, who served for 15 years in the Orange County public defender’s office before starting a criminal defense practice in Santa Ana, said he knows from experience that Orange County jurors are predominantly white, middle-class and conservative. Many are employees of government agencies and defense contractors, McDonald and other lawyers said.

“They have very little in common with people accused of crime,” McDonald said. “The new pool is certainly not going to be representative, and it will affect the results if people are less tolerant and sensitive to the other person’s side of the story.”

Milton Grimes, a prominent Newport Beach attorney who is black, expressed disappointment about the new jury system.

“Blacks are definitely going to miss out,” Grimes said. “I would think that the federal government would be more interested in having diverse juries in our diversified society.”

Grimes said it was a “natural instinct” for African Americans to want “people of their own kind on a jury that is judging them.”

“Imagine you are Caucasian and you were driving through Compton and you are accused of committing a crime in that area,” Grimes said. “You are faced with a black judge, a black clerk, a black prosecutor and an all-black jury. Wouldn’t you be concerned about the lack of diversity on that jury? Wouldn’t you have some degree of comfort if there was one of your kind on that jury?”

Before October, 1993, jurors were chosen from the seven counties within the federal court system’s Central District of California--Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

At the time, the federal courthouse in Santa Ana was considered a branch court, so court officials here were required by law to draw jurors from all counties within the district, despite higher food, hotel and travel costs and inconvenience to jurors who lived in faraway counties.

But in January, 1993, Congress created three court divisions within the Central District--Santa Ana, Los Angeles and Riverside. To reduce costs and inconvenience to jurors, the court implemented the current policy of drawing potential jurors for the Santa Ana federal court from only Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Steward’s office filed a lawsuit challenging that change after the jury pool assembled for a black defendant accused of bank robbery turned out to be almost exclusively white.

But U.S. District Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler, who heard the challenge, ruled that the process could produce jury pools reflecting the community’s racial makeup. Her ruling was upheld by the appellate panel.