No Justice in Jury Selection Process

Your editorial of Oct. 6 discussed the inadequate accommodation for prospective jurors at the county court in Santa Ana. The discussion focused on the costs of improving this accommodation to meet the requirements (according to your statement) of 400,000 juror summonses a year to this court.

You did not question the necessity of summoning 400,000 individuals for this onerous duty. This number is ridiculous. It represents one in five of the county’s population; and allowing for the number of ineligible prospective jurors, one can expect to be summoned, on the average, every three years.

I was summoned for jury duty in July of this year. After another hour of waiting, I was dispatched to the Harbor Court in Newport Beach. I had to stand in the corridor outside a courtroom until 11:30 a.m. As I had not had a drink since 5:30 a.m., I felt the need for some refreshment during this time and was told that there was no facility for refreshments in the courthouse--not even vending machines.

The case was an assault-and-battery charge. I counted the number of prospective jurors at 120--10 times the need. After all juror rejections, there were still 100 prospective jurors in the courtroom who were not required. We were finally dismissed at 4 p.m. I was angry that the county should waste my time on a frivolous summons.

The current process of selecting--or rather rejecting--jurors is so flawed that trial by jury is a mockery of justice. The allowed peremptory rejection of jurors by attorneys mainly due to the prospective juror’s occupation is designed to eliminate individuals who could have some capacity for analytic evaluation of expert witness’ testimony. The goal of jury selection is to find 12 individuals who have no intellectual curiosity and are most likely to be emotionally controlled by the rhetoric and obfuscations of evidence by the attorneys.

Clearly, the excess in the number of juror summonses is taken to the extreme of asininity. The jury system as we know it should be abolished. This would be difficult to legislate, as the jury system is the raison d’etre of the legal professions. However, some steps could be taken to reduce the number of jury summonses.

We can eliminate most of the rejections by introducing a preliminary IQ test for prospective jurors, to be taken by mail or locally. As only 10% of prospective jurors are paneled for service, we can select from the bottom 20% of the IQ test for jury summonses, which would still leave a margin for rejection. This seemingly facetious solution is no less ludicrous than the existing jury selection process.

Finally, the short-term solution in the overcrowding of the court is to present the bill for improvement of accommodation to the Bar Assn.--not the taxpayer. After all, the excess jury summonses are primarily to accommodate the devious practices of attorneys--not to promote the cause of justice.