L.A. County to Seek Exemption From Law to Reform Jury Duty

Although a new state law will drastically reduce the time most Californians will be required to spend on jury duty, Los Angeles residents probably will not enjoy the full benefit.

The Los Angeles County’s judicial system is simply too big to carry out the law, court officials said Wednesday.

The law gives counties until Jan. 1, 2000, to adopt a rule requiring courts to select prospective jurors for a trial on their first day of jury duty--or to excuse them for the rest of the year.

Gloria Gomez, manager of jury services, said Los Angeles County will devise a plan to give prospective jurors some relief, but not as much as the law requires. She said court officials will ask the California Judicial Council for permission to adopt a less demanding plan.

The law lets the council grant an exemption to any county that shows a good reason for not meeting the requirement. Without the exemption, Gomez said, local demand for prospective jurors could triple, increasing costs to the county.

“We will have a lot of problems,” she said. “Most people would have to be called to jury duty twice a year, some even three times instead of just once.”

Superior Court Judge Aurelio Munoz, chairman of the county’s Grand and Trial Jurors Committee, said, “We will not be able to do the ‘one day or one trial law,’ but we probably could do two days or one trial.”

She and Munoz said Los Angeles cannot implement the one-day law because of the lack of eligible jury prospects, as well as the cost.

Despite the size of Los Angeles County, it still has difficulty meeting the seemingly insatiable demands for jurors for the 7,000 trials each year.

“Our Superior Court is the largest one in the world,” Munoz said.

Under the current system, Gomez’s office summons prospective jurors from driver’s license and voting records. She estimates that about 6.5 million county residents meet basic juror requirements: be a U.S. citizen who speaks English and is at least 18 years old.

People who are summoned to the busiest courthouses, such as the downtown Criminal Courts Building, must appear for at least 10 consecutive days. If they are not selected to serve on a trial at the end of 10 days, their jury duty is over for at least a year.

At smaller courthouses, they may only have to appear one day, but be available for the remaining 10 days. In those courts, the 10 days of jury service could be spread over several weeks.

Under the new law, jurors would have to report for one day, and if not selected for a trial, they would be free of jury duty for at least one year. About half of the counties, including Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino, already use some form of that system.

Gomez said the county hopes to devise a plan in which jurors could be on call for jury service for several consecutive days, possibly as few as five.

Last year, the county sent more than 3 million affidavits to prospective jurors to determine their eligibility to serve. Although the law requires people to respond, Gomez said, almost half did not.

Many of the affidavits did not get to the right address. But many people did not respond because they did not understand the affidavit because of language or other barriers.

Of the 340,000 who did respond in the county, about half served on a jury. The county in the 1997-98 fiscal year spent $7.5 million to pay jurors the $5-a-day fee and 27-cent-per-mile reimbursement.

Full implementation of the new law would triple juror costs, and require increased staffing in the county’s 35 jury assembly rooms, Gomez said. Moreover, the assembly rooms are already jammed, so the county would have to find more space, she added.

Gomez said courts will experiment with several plans between now and 2000.