Judge Bars Survey of Jury Pool

UCLA law professor Gary Blasi isn’t the first potential juror to gripe about the inconvenience and time-wasting aspects of jury service.

But Blasi, 56, may be among the first whose pique subjected him to a gag order.

Concerned about the amount of idle time he and other prospective jurors were spending in the jury assembly room, he decided this week to conduct a survey of his fellow court captives to find out what their attitudes were about the process.

But Thursday morning, Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta, who is in charge of Traffic Court at the Metropolitan Courthouse just south of downtown Los Angeles, quickly put a stop to it. Saying he feared that Blasi’s survey might taint the “quasi-holy” jury process, Ohta issued a formal order preventing him from conducting any systematic interviews or surveys of prospective jurors.

“When Mr. Blasi is conducting this research with other potential jurors, it’s possible that in some way it could influence jurors in a certain way,” Ohta said.

Although Blasi’s experience may amuse court critics, Ohta’s decision also highlights serious questions about the extent to which judges have the power to limit free speech if they believe it jeopardizes their ability to seat impartial juries.

“There is a free speech question involved here,” said Stan Goldman, a law professor at Loyola University and a former public defender. “But there has to be a balance of interests here,” he said, speaking of the judge’s duty to protect the integrity of the jury pool.

That said, Goldman declared, “It’s a bit of a stretch to say this questionnaire would affect the integrity of the jury.”

The dispute began to unfold Tuesday, when Blasi, after having sat for hours without being called to a courtroom, began asking other jurors how they felt about the idle time they were spending in the waiting room and their feelings about the entire jury process.

Being a researcher and seeing a chance to gather data for a newspaper “op-ed piece” or a journal article, Blasi decided to turn wasted time into something productive.

“As my annoyance increased, I decided I would do a little study,” said the professor, who previously worked in legal aid for more than a decade. Instead of just chit-chatting about the issue, Blasi wanted to record the information in a more systematic way. He developed a two-page survey form. Part of the survey simply gathered information about people’s jury service, such as how long they had been waiting and how many times they had been summoned to a courtroom. The second set of questions sought their opinions about how they were treated, whether they believed the court system showed sufficient respect for their time and whether they thought court officials could do a better job.

The courts need answers to those questions, Blasi said in an interview. “When do you think is the last time a judge went down to a jury assembly to try to gather this kind of information?” he asked.

After court Wednesday, Blasi notified a jury service administrator by E-mail that he planned to distribute the survey form. On Thursday morning, the administrator told him his plan violated court policy.

Blasi challenged the administrator’s decision but withheld the survey until she could discuss the matter with Ohta. Ohta called a brief hearing, and then ordered Blasi to abandon his survey.

“I agree, and the courts agree, with the importance of finding out how jurors feel about jury service and how the court can assist in making it better,” Ohta said. “What he was trying to do was a good thing.”

Nevertheless, doing it in the jury assembly room was “inappropriate,” Ohta said.

“The jury pool is sacred,” Ohta said. “They should come here with a clean slate, to serve the court, to do this solemn, quasi-holy duty. So you try to create an environment to foster that attitude.”

Superior Court Assistant Presiding Judge Robert Dukes agreed. “The court has the responsibility of protecting privacy rights of jurors,” he said. “They are there against their will. They are not free to just leave if another juror starts asking them questions.”

Blasi scoffed at such notions. The questions would not inflame the juror, and any juror who didn’t want to answer his questions could simply refuse and walk away.

“The gag order violates my 1st Amendment rights [to freedom of speech],” he said, adding that he is considering filing suit in federal court to challenge the decision.

If he does, he probably will not win, said Goldman, the Loyola Law School professor. Although Goldman says Blasi should have been allowed to do the survey, higher courts usually are reluctant to second-guess a trial judge’s discretion in protecting a jury’s integrity.

“Once a trial judge makes a decision like this, a higher court will usually go out of its way to find a good reason for letting him do it.”

As for Blasi, he finally got summoned for a trial late Thursday. But if he had not, he was going to keep talking to fellow jurors.

“I just wouldn’t do it systematically,” he said.