A Diverse Grand Jury Promises to Represent All

The new Orange County Grand Jury sworn in Monday includes a Vietnamese American journalist, a German American aerospace planner and a retired African American U.S. Marine Corps officer. As members of the most diverse panel in county history, they pledge to more fairly represent minority groups.

“The grand jury is a watchdog organization, and we want to make sure that all kinds of services are being delivered to all types of people fairly in Orange County,” said Joseph Gatlin, the grand jury’s first African American foreman and a retired service officer. “Diversity gives a lot of credibility to the general population in Orange County. People feel that their best interests are being looked after.”

Among the areas he wants the jury to investigate, Gatlin said, are whether police stop motorists for traffic infractions because of the color of their skin and whether Vietnamese communities are getting adequate social services.

This year’s 19-member jury has one African American, two Asian Americans, two Native Americans and three Latinos. Gatlin said he believes that more balanced ethnic representation makes the jury more fair.

Last year’s panel had no minority members and was sharply criticized for its lack of ethnic and geographic diversity, especially considering the makeup of such areas as Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Westminster.

That sparked an aggressive recruitment effort directed by Superior Court Presiding Judge C. Robert Jameson, who sent press releases to local mainstream and ethnic newspapers and spoke on a Vietnamese talk show to encourage minority representation.

“The idea was that if you have diversity in the jury pool, then you’ll get diversity in the grand jury,” Jameson said.

Improving grand jury diversity has long been a problem for panels in Orange County and elsewhere. In Los Angeles County, the presiding judge said he would create a second panel drawn from a more ethnically diverse pool.

Jameson does not know how many members entered the selection pool as a result of his campaign, but one member, An Thi Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant who is now a real estate agent, journalist and novelist in Fountain Valley, said she first heard about the process through a press release sent to her ethnic newspaper.

Like many other new jurors, Nguyen wants to improve conditions in the Vietnamese community by looking at Asian youth in prisons and figuring out how to improve their condition.

“The most important thing is education, education, education,” she said. “If people are better educated, they keep out of jail because they’re making money with their minds.”

Jury members said they believe a more diverse panel will improve the quality of representation and allow a wider variety of viewpoints.

But many like Edmond Macias, a Latino jury member who recently retired from his position as vice chancellor of business for the California State university system, were uncertain whether it would fundamentally change the group’s direction or agenda.

“I think a more diverse grand jury will be helpful,” he said. “There have been very few Latinos in the past few years. But I’m in this to make things better. There’s no predetermined idea of what will happen.”