When Death Is No Barrier to a Jury Summons

I’ve heard the Los Angeles County courts are desperate for jurors, and I believe it.

My husband has been dead three years and they still want him.

Indeed, his death made him more attractive. Previous mailings were just preliminary inquiries. This time they summoned him to start service at 7:45 a.m. on March 16.

It’s amazing. This is someone who will have to decide right and wrong, and our judicial system doesn’t even care if he can think.

Justice has been blind, and in Los Angeles, she can also be dead.

*

Getting Los Angeles residents to serve as jurors has been a problem. Those who do perform this civic duty often find it a punishing experience, given the discomfort, the inefficiency, the bureaucratic mistreatment and disrespect.

By 1995, half of the 4 million people contacted annually for jury duty weren’t even answering the mailings, so the courts recently initiated a get-tough program, threatening fines of up to $1,500.

A lot was written about the program and all the scofflaws who made it necessary. Nobody mentioned the fact that many of those mailings probably went to people who had already indicated they were poor prospects.

Take my husband. He was dead three months when the first inquiry came. I noted that he had just died, signed the notice under penalty of perjury, and sent it back. I didn’t expect a sympathy note.

Nor did I expect a jury commissioner to write back a half year later demanding a death certificate.

Such distrust may be particular to this branch of government. The registrar of voters believed me: While I watched, my husband’s name was deleted from the voter rolls. (Come to think of it: If someone isn’t on the voter rolls and has no driver’s license or property in his name, where do our courts get the name? Mail order catalogs? Reader’s Digest sweepstakes?)

Perhaps distrust is the court’s reaction to all “not here” responses. For all I know, someone who sends back a summons marked “Moved--not at this address” has to provide a deed or a lease agreement.

My husband wasn’t the only one challenged. A friend’s mother, age 79, got a juror inquiry last fall, and wrote back that she was 79, in ill health and hard of hearing. She was relieved that a physician’s statement was “not required” for those over 70. Still, back came her questionnaire with her statement highlighted in yellow and a note demanding a physician’s statement.

What seems suspicion may be simple incompetence, despite the pose that this is a computerized, well-organized system. One gets a juror ID number and another number called a PIN. Forms are divided and color coded by type of response, with multiple boxes to mark and signatures required and complicated instructions (“If your answer is yes, go to Step 3, No. 1 . . . If your answer is yes to both questions, go to Step 3, No. 2. . . .”) Care and accuracy are required because processing is careful and accurate.

In fact, the information may not be filed or noted at all. When my elderly mother received an inquiry in 1996, we wrote that she was “90 years old, blind, frail and housebound.” When she got another the very next year, we wrote: “Last year [she] was 90 years old, blind, frail and housebound. This year she’s 91 and not improved.”

A 20-year-old college student I know received three juror inquiries in one year. She’s not a citizen, didn’t have permanent resident status until midyear and doesn’t drive (did they get her name from Nordstrom?). Each time she checked off the appropriate excuse; each time it was ignored.

Some human intervention would help. But callers can’t get to a “telephone agent” unless they have already confirmed that they are citizens, over 18, county residents, English-speaking and not felons, and that they only want a different date or court assignment.

Government entities that need the cooperation of all citizens shouldn’t be so unresponsive. Instead of hounding the unqualified, they could be more flexible. They might hold weekend court, let people choose dates, schedule some sessions so parents of young children--otherwise excused--could take them to school and still serve. Not the easiest jurors to accommodate, but they’re alive.

*

I finally called a juror assembly room and asked what to do with a summons for someone no longer at the given address.

Send it back with a forwarding address, said the man. “Actually, he’s dead,” I said.

“Then just write that the person’s deceased,” he said.

This time, I did both. I circled the name and address on the summons, wrote “Dead--left no forwarding address” in big letters, and sent it back.

May it rest, finally.