‘One-Trial’ Jury System Gets Big Test in Van Nuys

There was a time when Glenda Biersbach dreaded jury duty.

“It used to be just horrible,” said the Van Nuys secretary, who has served five times. “You get there and you wait. You wait and wait and wait and wait” for up to two weeks in the jury assembly room.

But on Monday, the first day of the new “one-trial” jury system in Van Nuys, Biersbach was all smiles as she walked out of the courthouse into the late afternoon, having fulfilled her civic duty after just one day.

Biersbach was among the first 160 to 170 jurors to experience the new program in the Los Angeles County Superior Court’s Van Nuys Division. Jurors now are on call there for five days. On the day they are told to appear in court, unless they are selected for a jury pool or actually seated on a case that day, their jury duty is complete.

“It just seems more organized. If you don’t get picked, you leave,” said Kym Wenborg, a 40-year-old network engineer from Van Nuys, after he finished his jury duty.

Under the old system still used in many courthouses in Los Angeles County, jurors could sit in a courthouse for up to two weeks without serving on a trial, or could be on call for up to three weeks.

Van Nuys is not the first in the county to begin the program. But as the second-biggest district in the massive court system and the largest so far to be converted, its experience is being closely watched, jurists and court administrators said. Other county courts that use the one-trial system include San Fernando, Newhall, Lancaster, Pomona and Pasadena.

When it began last May in Pasadena, the court staffs initially were overwhelmed with angry or confused jurors, in part because too many were called at once and because their instructions weren’t clear, court administrators said.

Many came on the wrong day. People who expected to be dismissed because of financial hardship were shocked to learn that the court had cracked down on those requests.

Things got so tense in the jury assembly room that a bailiff had to be stationed there.

But the program has improved, court administrators said. New forms and automated phone messages now instruct people more clearly.

More staff have been hired to deal with the greater volume of jurors that the new system requires.

For the most part, things ran smoothly Monday in Van Nuys.

“As each district has gotten it, we’ve learned through trial and error,” said Michael Paul McCullough, assistant court manager for Van Nuys.

At the San Fernando Courthouse, which converted several weeks ago, an initial “miscommunication” resulted in too few jurors showing up, said Superior Court Judge William MacLaughlin. But that problem has been resolved.

Now, MacLaughlin said, “it’s going quite well. It’s a great advance for persons called as jurors. It gives much more clarity and certainty to their jury service.”

But the program also creates more work for the court system. Van Nuys used to have two employees in the jury assembly room; now it has four.

Under the new system, judges must issue their requests by midday for the next day’s jury pools, said Michael J. Farrell, supervising judge at Van Nuys.

Judges can’t always predict their needs by then, and courtrooms that suddenly open up during the day might be unused, Farrell said.

The program is here to stay, though. It is mandated by state law, and Los Angeles County, which has the largest jury system in the world, has until January 2002 to convert fully to the new system.

“It’s a change in a long-established system,” McCullough said. “It’s going to be difficult for everybody . . . but we’ll work it out.”