Judges Advocate Bill to Keep Juries Anonymous

The summons to jury duty seemed to Richard Olvera like a harmless call to civic service--until his uncle warned him of perils lurking in the Downtown Criminal Courts Building. “If you vote guilty, the [convicted] guy will get revenge,” Olvera said his uncle predicted.

The more Olvera thought about it, the more sense his uncle made. As a juror, Olvera would have to state his name in public, then tell everyone that he lives in El Monte and works as a service representative for Southern California Edison. What if some thug’s cohorts were in court taking notes, plotting to pressure or frighten or harm him?

“I know it’s a possibility,” Olvera said as he waited to be assigned to a jury Friday afternoon. “These gangbangers, their mentality is all about revenge.”

To soothe such fears, an association of local judges is pushing for proposed legislation allowing jurors in all criminal cases to remain anonymous. State Sen. Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia) has pledged to introduce a bill this winter to identify jurors by number rather than name. And the statewide Judicial Council on Friday announced plans to study the issue as part of a comprehensive jury improvement project.

“We’re trying to come up with ways to make courts more user-friendly for jurors,” Municipal Judge Dan Oki said. “They can be more candid in their deliberations and less intimidated if their personal information is kept from view.”

The drive to protect jurors’ identities alarms some defense attorneys. By promising anonymity upfront, they say, the courts would be signaling that defendants should be presumed dangerous when they are supposed to be presumed innocent.

“It just feeds into the general paranoia,” said Alex Ricciardulli, a deputy public defender for Los Angeles County. “The message it sends the juror is that this guy is so dangerous we don’t even trust him with your name.”

But proponents of the reform insist that many people already watch criminal defendants warily.

If jurors were granted anonymity in every case, Municipal Judge Philip K. Mautino said, the playing field would level out: a tattoo-pocked gang member charged with murder would not seem any more dangerous than a suit-clad physician suspected of drunk driving. Anonymity, he added, also makes jurors more honest--more willing to disclose prior convictions during the jury selection process.

As the presiding judge of Los Cerritos Municipal Court, Mautino experimented with anonymous juries for a year in 1994. The program drew praise from thousands of jurors. But last winter, judges in three higher courts decided that Mautino was overstepping his authority.

Mautino lobbied Mountjoy to draft legislation protecting jurors’ identities. The proposed law would also require jury instructions to be written in language that is easy to understand and would allow jurors to submit questions to expert witnesses during trials.

Juror Jean Ofsanko likes what the law would do. She felt no qualms about identifying herself in court--at first. Then she started pondering the implications of broadcasting her name and hometown. Jurors in the O.J. Simpson case, she noted, were hounded and harassed after returning not guilty verdicts. Retaliation against a juror “could happen,” Ofsanko decided. “Don’t kid yourself.”

Public defender Ricciardulli points out that the overwhelming majority of jurors receive no threats and suffer no harm.

He worries that identifying jurors only by number will dehumanize the justice system, threatening the courts’ tradition of openness. And he fears that anonymous jurors will lose their sense of personal responsibility for a defendant’s fate because they will not have to attach their names to their verdicts.