Sentenced to 10 Days of Jury Duty

“We Love Our Jurors,” proclaimed the large banner that greeted me last month when I arrived at Room 210 at the Santa Monica Courthouse for my 10 days of jury duty.

Yeah, right.

When every one of the 150 or so chairs in the Jury Assembly Room was filled, when the cell phones rang in syncopated rhythm, and when the afternoon heat pushed the temperature inside past stuffy to stifling, I thought surely that banner was meant as a joke.

This was my third time around as a potential juror in Santa Monica and the ladies behind the window--the ones who decide when you can go to the bathroom or summon you to a courtroom--were trying hard to make this important civic duty as painless as possible. But there’s a revolution of rising expectations afoot in Room 210 and in other jury assembly rooms across the county.

Eleven of the county’s 35 courthouses have cut jury service to the new state standard requiring jurors to serve only one day unless they are put on a panel. But Los Angeles is so gargantuan that the county asked for, and got, more time for all the courthouses to comply.

Still, Santa Monica, along with the downtown courthouses and many others, is under enormous pressure to move in that direction. The word is out in Room 210, passing sotto voce down the rows of royal blue Naugahyde chairs: Jurors assigned to courts in Pomona, Bellflower, Norwalk, Alhambra, Pasadena, San Fernando, Lancaster, Newhall, East Los Angeles and Van Nuys need show up for only one day unless they’re impaneled for a trial. Meanwhile, we Santa Monicans had to serve out our 10-day sentence, usually by a combination of tush-to-chair and the court’s telephone on-call system. No possibility of parole.

From the looks of things, that transition from 10 days or one trial to one day or one trial won’t be easy in Santa Monica or the rest of the county. Yet, unless the shift happens soon, the court could squander the fragile goodwill it has worked hard to build among we, the summoned.

For me, jury duty was not oppressive. My employer paid for the full 10 days. We jurors kept gentleman’s hours: in by 10 a.m. and out by 4:30 p.m. The drive to the courthouse took a fraction of the time of my usual freeway crawl to downtown L.A., and spread before me during my 90-minute lunch break were convenient shopping, the beach and a smorgasbord of eateries, some of which now offer juror discounts. In 10 days, I caught up on reading, worked a puzzle or two and gabbed on the phone.

So what’s the problem? For one thing, many employers still refuse to cover the days and the self-employed take a big financial hit. It’s also complicated to put your work on hold for two weeks and surprisingly hard to have nothing to do all day but wait for the lunch break. During my two weeks, I was assigned to three courtrooms. The defense attorney in one civil trial dismissed me during voir dire, and in the two others, I asked to be excused because the trials would have taken me well past my 10 days. Two full months for one, a capital murder case.

For those of us whose bosses and colleagues actually expect to see us again in this life, the reality is that by Day 5, we’re short-timers, no good for anything other than perhaps a quickie drunk-driving trial. I really wanted to sit on a jury. I take seriously the stuff about civic duty and strongly believe that our justice system beats anyone else’s. So did the folks around me in Room 210, many of whom recounted trials on which they’d sat. But as the days passed, I felt like Charlie the Tuna, the raspy-voiced fish for whom the Starkist Tuna hook never dangled. The one-day or one-trial system would give judges one good shot at us and then let us leave.

Multiply me by 500--that’s the number of people who were cycled through during my second week because of the murder trial--and you begin to see the problem.

My fellow jurors were a fairly good-natured bunch, able to check the frustration of waiting around. One woman studied intently for a nursing exam. There was ongoing banter about the Gore-Bush campaign in one corner. An impromptu crochet and embroidery group formed in another, and a woman who sat next to me one morning spent the time on her cell phone searching for an honoree, preferably rich, for an upcoming benefit dinner.

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There was also the inevitable grumbling--complaints about the droning TV, the saggy chairs, or not enough chairs. But the major beef was the time wasted--the 10 long, boring, pointless, empty days that we had to serve while folks in Pomona or Norwalk were being sent to a courtroom or sent on their way.

Los Angeles is bringing up the rear on California’s switch to one-trial duty; most other counties, including Orange and Ventura, have already complied with the 1999 state mandate. Our size and population make it much tougher here: a larger percentage of non-English speakers and noncitizens means court administrators have to scratch harder for prospective jurors. At the same time, more complex civil trials and more serious crime happen here, meaning court officials need to call more of us to hear those longer trials.

Plans call for Santa Monica to move to one-day or one-trial in May 2001, with the rest of the county, including the mammoth downtown courthouses, following by January 2002.

The logistics are impossible. Santa Monica currently averages about 300 people each week. Court officials estimate that the new one-trial system, combined with a new summons form, will call for at least 5,000 people each week. Just in Santa Monica. Triple that for the downtown Los Angeles courthouses. State law says we can be called back for jury service annually.

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For the first year or so, jurors could be required to check in by telephone for up to five days, unless summoned to appear at the courthouse. But where will they put those who do show up? Room 210 already looks like O’Hare Airport during a snowstorm. And like many county facilities, the Santa Monica courthouse, last renovated in 1964, is way over capacity and worn. Paint peels in some places. The drinking fountain on the second floor works, and then it doesn’t. A falling ceiling tile grazed the shoulder of a court staffer one morning while a group of us waited outside a courtroom.

An architect’s rendering on the wall in Room 210 depicts the snazzy new jury assembly area planned for Santa Monica, including a cafeteria and conversational groupings of tables and chairs. But that drawing was tacked up in 1998. The state money that would make it a reality is not yet forthcoming.

Neither are funds for all the extra postage involved in summoning 4,700 more people per week, the upgraded computer programs and the additional staff.

“We need $10 million to make this program work countywide,” says John Clarke, Los Angeles Superior Court’s executive officer. “We’re still waiting on $5 million from Sacramento. We’ve pushed the system to its absolute capacity at this point.”

Ten days is a long time to sit around. Another year-plus is longer still.