Making Jury Duty Less Trying

If all goes well, this may be the last time Van Bell goes through the dreaded 10-day jury duty routine.

In a crowded room at the Criminal Courts Building downtown recently, he slept. He read. He stared into space. He watched others, long-faced and glassy-eyed, shift in their seats. He talked with strangers. Anything to pass the time.

The View Park corrections administrator was called into a courtroom a few times, but he wasn’t selected for a jury. So back he went to the jury assembly room until he fulfilled his obligation of being a juror.

“It’s not a good experience,” said Bell, who is in his 50s. “It’s a lot of wasted time. It needs to be streamlined.”

But winds of change are sweeping over the county, promising to vastly reduce the waiting time for jurors such as Bell, who is among a tiny percentage of Angelenos who perform jury duty when asked to do so.

Los Angeles County has one of the lowest juror participation rates in the country, due in part to an inefficient summons system and public perceptions that juror time is wasted. In places such as Orange and San Bernardino counties, which have more efficient jury systems, about 25% of people who receive summonses show up for jury duty. In rural areas elsewhere in the country, the response rate can be as high as 60%.

In Los Angeles County, about 5% of those initially contacted show up to serve.

The low rate alarms judges and policymakers because it suggests public disenchantment with the jury system and a jury pool that doesn’t reflect the community.

To improve juror experiences and encourage those who have been evading the call to duty, efforts are underway to reform the county’s jury system. Court officials say they have been cracking down on those who willfully refuse to serve by slapping them with $1,500 fines, and judges are tightening loopholes for those pleading excuses. The county is also streamlining the summons process and rolling out a “one day or one trial” program, mandated by the state for all counties as of Jan. 1 this year.

“We have to make our system work as efficiently as we can,” said Judge Jacqueline Connor, co-chairwoman of the Grand and Trial Jury Committee of the county Superior Court. Once the reforms are implemented, she predicted, “more people will be participating, and the quality of justice will be better.”

Seeking to Increase Diversity of Panelists

Jury reform aims not only to treat jurors with more respect but also increase their diversity, jurists and experts say.

“If you have a broad range of experiences and backgrounds, collectively [the jury] should be better at judging the case,” said Richardson Lynn, dean of the Pepperdine School of Law and author of a book on juries.

But unfortunately for Los Angeles County, the juror pool has not been representative of the area’s dynamic diversity.

Angelenos who serve on juries “tend to be retirees, government employees. They tend to have lower levels of formal education. You don’t get people who are highly educated or in prominent positions,” said Philip K. Anthony, chief executive of DecisionQuest, a jury and trial consulting firm.

When juries are egregiously unrepresentative of communities, the public loses trust in the justice system, legal experts said.

“The quality of justice is completely keyed to the quality of our juries’ representativeness,” Connor said. “The system is really only as good as our jurors.”

Public opinion of courts is also shaped by people’s experiences as jurors, said California Chief Justice Ronald M. George, who regards jury reform as a top priority. “If jurors aren’t treated appropriately, they come back very embittered about not just the justice system but also the government,” he said.

To improve juror conditions, George has advocated higher juror pay, which at the current rate of $5 a day in California is among the lowest in the nation. He also established a task force to reform jury instructions so that judges speak to jurors in plain English rather than legalese. But the centerpiece of jury reform, George said, is the “one day or one trial” system.

The program typically works like this: If jurors are not in voir dire--through which lawyers choose or excuse them in the courtroom--or picked for a jury by the end of their first day of service, they are released.

“It makes perfect sense,” said John Collins, a Southland attorney and a member of the California Judicial Council, the policymaking arm of the state court system. “It’s embraced by everyone. The bar likes it. The courts like it. Employers like it. Jurors like it.”

“One day or one trial” programs have been an integral part of some Southern California courts for years. Ventura County has had such a system since 1980, while San Bernardino County’s is more than a decade old. Orange County has had it since 1993. At least 24 counties statewide have such a program in place.

About 40% of the U.S. population lives in counties with a “one day or one trial” system, and those people’s experiences have been very positive, said G. Thomas Munsterman, director of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts. “When you shorten the term of service, the yield always go up,” said Munsterman, who has worked as a jury systems consultant in all 50 states.

Orange County, for instance, had a 9% juror yield rate in 1992, the year before “one day or one trial” took effect. By the end of 1993, the yield had climbed to 17%. Now it’s 25%. “ ‘One day, one trial’ was the main factor in boosting juror participation,” said jury services manager Thu Nguyen.

Los Angeles County’s 12-district Superior Court, burdened by the largest jury system in the world, has been much slower to convert. It was granted an extension until January 2002 to fully implement the mandated system.

One-trial programs have been launched in the Pasadena, Pomona and Norwalk districts of the Superior Court system with encouraging results. Their juror yield rates have already climbed as high as 15%, said Gloria Gomez, manager of juror services. The county expects to convert one or two more courthouses every month and is calling its system “one trial” to counter public perceptions that all jurors serve only one day, when in fact people selected for a jury can end up serving in a trial that lasts many days.

High costs and complexities present hurdles to full implementation within two years. Because most jurors will serve fewer days, more people are needed to feed the massive court system that conducts more than 6,000 jury trials a year. That means more summonses, larger staffs and more technology to accommodate the additional jurors.

In fiscal year 1997-98, the most recent for which statistics are available, about 175,600 people served as jurors in Los Angeles County. Under a one-trial system, the number of jurors is expected to increase five- to seven-fold, Gomez said.

The county’s one-trial program will cost about $10 million to implement, a sum that the state-funded court system currently doesn’t have, Gomez said.

Earlier this month, Gov. Gray Davis earmarked $16.8 million in his proposed budget for jury reform. Of that, $12.7 million would go toward increasing jury compensation to $12 a day, and $4.1 million would help fund “one day, one trial” programs across the state, said Sandy Harrison, spokesman for the state Department of Finance.

Los Angeles County is in negotiations with “people up north” over more funding, Gomez said.

When Orange County began “one day, one trial” in 1993, it didn’t have the money either, Nguyen said. The solution: The court stopped paying jurors for the first day of service and used the money to fund the new system. The county courts ended up with about $500,000 in net savings that year, she said.

‘No One Has the Complexities of L.A.’

It’s not entirely fair to compare the jury response rate of Los Angeles County with that of other counties, experts and court administrators say.

“It’s so large, the system serves so many neighborhoods,” Munsterman said. “No one has the complexities of Los Angeles.”

The requirements for being a juror limit the eligible pool: One must be at least 18 years old, a U.S. citizen, a non-felon and an English speaker. The county has many noncitizens, and many citizens don’t speak English well enough to serve. The population is also transient--about 15% of the affidavits mailed out never reach people who have moved, Gomez said.

But inefficiency is also partly to blame for the low yield rate. Unlike other counties that send out a single notice to prospective jurors, Los Angeles County has been mailing to people twice.

First, affidavits are sent to people on voter registration and Department of Motor Vehicles rolls. Based on what people mail back, Gomez’s staff weeds out the unqualified or those claiming excuses such as medical problems or financial hardship.

Months later, summonses are mailed to those deemed qualified and able.

Moving briskly about an office stacked with crates overflowing with returned juror response forms, Gomez pulled out a handful of affidavits.

“This person here is not qualified--not a U.S. citizen. This person is qualified, but we have an excuse right here--his employer won’t pay,” Gomez said before continuing to flip through the papers. “Here is a person not able to read English. Here is a person who has a medical problem.”

The unscientific sampling of 10 affidavits yielded two people who were qualified and able. “If we get 15 out of 100, we’re doing very well,” Gomez said.

But not all 15 send back their summonses. Some move. Some have new excuses not to serve. And those who listed excuses on their affidavits that are no longer applicable--a day care problem that has since been solved, for example--fall through the cracks.

At the courts that now have the one-trial system, the county has introduced a single-reply system, in which the affidavit and the summons are combined into one form. That alone should increase juror yield, Gomez said. A one-year experiment by the county using the one-form system a few years ago more than doubled the yield rate.

A Harbinger for the County

As home to a pilot one-trial program launched in May 1999, the Pasadena court might provide a harbinger of things to come elsewhere in the county.

Before the one-trial system took effect, the court called in about 140 jurors once a week, said Cindy Rendon, district jury coordinator for Pasadena. Now, the court cycles through that many jurors every day.

To accommodate all those people, her office of two employees has grown to three full-time, one part-time and two “backup” employees. “It’s very stressful and tiring that we’re processing [jurors] every day,” Rendon said.

Some jurors, though, said they like the program just fine.

“This new system is a lot better,” said William Wiederkehr, a 68-year-old retiree from Pasadena. “You can’t leave town, but at least you have the day to yourself, not sitting in a court lounge like the way before.”

The Pasadena court requires jurors to be on call five days: they phone in daily to find out if they need to appear the next day. Wiederkehr was in the middle of voir dire at the end of his first day of service, and because he wasn’t chosen the second day, he was free to go.

Since the one-trial program began, more first-time jurors seem to be participating, Rendon said.

Every morning, her staff asks during juror orientation for a show of hands: “How many of you have never had jury duty before?” About three-fourths of them raise their hands. “It used to be vice versa--about 75% had served before, 25% had not,” Rendon said.

Like other Los Angeles County courthouses with one-trial systems, Pasadena’s is closing loopholes that allowed people to dodge service in the past.

Under the old system, potential jurors who claimed that their employer wouldn’t pay them during jury duty would automatically be excused on financial hardship grounds. Rendon and her staff said they’ve seen CEOs, attorneys and even people with million-dollar incomes plead financial hardship.

Now, financial hardship excuses are scrutinized. Potential jurors who make such claims must disclose their employer, household income and number of dependents. A judge reviews each case.

The crackdown on financial hardship excuses has angered some prospective jurors who say they might lose a key contract or client if they are on jury duty. Rendon and her staff ask those people to reschedule their service at a more convenient time.

In response to the crackdown, people seem to lie more, says Rendon’s staff.

“We had one man from Beverly Hills--he made $200,000 or $300,000 a year. We wouldn’t approve him for financial hardship,” said Socorro Valenzuela, an office assistant. The man then approached another employee, and Valenzuela overheard him claiming severe child care issues.

More controversial is how the new policy affects middle-class jurors. Rendon’s staff has heard teachers complain that they don’t get paid during jury duty and become upset when they’re not excused. But because most people are serving far less time, the burden is not that great even when employers won’t pay, court administrators say.

California law does not require employers to provide paid jury leave. And there’s not much that can be done, other than social pressure, to compel companies to change. “In terms of civic responsibility, it doesn’t play well with public relations,” said Gomez of companies that refuse to pay employees during jury duty.

The Superior Court is compiling a list of such firms. “We’re extending the invitation to them to enter the group of employers who support jury service,” Gomez said. She declined a reporter’s request for the list.

For some whose employers do pay during jury duty, even 10 days of service isn’t that bad. “It’s time away from work, to relax,” said Joerg Rottenbacher, a 39-year-old computer analyst who works for Edison.

But Bell, the correctional administrator, said he’s looking forward to the streamlined, one-trial system. “That’s a lot better than all the waiting that we do,” he said. “That will be the way to go.”