Garcetti Backs Jury Service Reform Law

Breaking ranks with other top judicial officials, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said Wednesday that Los Angeles County court managers should do whatever is necessary to fully implement a new law that will greatly reduce the jury service burden on the tens of thousands of residents summoned to courthouses each year.

Vowing to oppose any effort by court administrators to seek an exemption from adopting the law, Garcetti said:

“My message to them is, ‘Just do it.’

“This law is very important to the integrity of the jury process and the judicial system as a whole.

“Other large counties are going to do it, so are you telling me Los Angeles County is simply unable to? I just can’t believe that is so.”

Last week, California adopted a law requiring courts to select prospective jurors for a trial on their first day of jury duty or excuse them for the rest of the year. Every county will be required to implement the law by Jan. 1, 2000, unless it can prove to the California Judicial Council that doing so would be impractical.

Twenty-one counties--including Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino--have already adopted some form of the plan. Officials in San Diego County, which has the second-largest judicial system in the state, said Wednesday that they still have not decided whether they will ask for an exemption.

The Judicial Council has not established exemption criteria, spokesman Jason Alderman said Wednesday. He said, however, that state court administrators have conceded that counties may be unable to meet the deadline if they have had difficulty filling juries or do not have enough employees or facilities to accommodate more jurors.

In Los Angeles County, court officials said last week that they will ask for the exemption because Los Angeles County’s judicial system is so big that they will not be able to carry out the law.

The county will devise a plan to give prospective jurors some relief, but not as much as the law requires, Superior Court Judge Aurelio Munoz, chairman of the county’s Grand and Trial Jurors Committee, and Gloria Gomez, manager of jury services, have said.

Public Defender Mike Judge and Presiding Superior Court Judge Robert W. Parkin said Wednesday that the county should try to fully implement the law or at least do it in stages.

Judge said Los Angeles could adopt some modification as a first step and use the one-day or one-trial plan as the county’s goal.

“Even a modified version would be a substantial benefit to people and to the judicial system,” he said.

Parkin said the county will try to experiment with the plan in one judicial district--probably Pomona--to see if the one-day or one-trial law will work.

But he also warned that Los Angeles has unique problems.

The primary difficulty is meeting the demand for jurors, Gomez has said. Although the county has a large population, only 6.5 million meet minimum requirements for jury service: the ability to speak English, U.S. citizenship and being at least 18 years old. Close to half of the people who receive affidavits to determine their eligibility do not respond.

“We use 7,000 jurors a day,” Gomez said.

Garcetti said such figures should not deter court administrators. He said court officials should do a better job of enforcing the jury service summons, even if it means making an example of some no-shows by holding them in contempt of court.

But the district attorney says that more people would respond to the affidavits if jury service was not so onerous.

Finally, he said Los Angeles County’s burden is no greater, proportionately, than that of other large counties.

While conceding that Los Angeles has a big judicial system, Garcetti said the demand for jurors is similar to that of counties using the new system.

On that basis, Los Angeles County actually has close to the same proportion of qualified prospective jurors as Orange County, where the one-trial or one-day plan has been in use since 1993. With 1.2 million citizens qualified to be summoned, Orange County has about 800 prospective jurors per trial, about 100 fewer than Los Angeles County.

“It works great,” Orange County jury services manager Sandra Vale said.

She also said people were more willing to answer jury service calls when the new system was adopted.

“Our yield, which is the percentage of jurors answering summonses, rose about 10%,” she said. “We were pretty happy about that.”