Juries in San Diego

Here is an interesting twist on an issue that I previously blogged about: the use of the jury summons in San Diego. It appears that now the local District Attorney (DA) also has concerns about the jury summons process and is calling for "court officials to fix a flaw in how jurors are summoned to the downtown courts."

As you may recall, this issue was originally raised by two local defense attorneys (Christopher Plourd and Donald Levine) who argued that Latinos were underrepresented in downtown San Diego juries. At the core of the defense attorneys' argument is the analysis by a San Diego State University professor [John Weeks] who concluded that "Latinos eligible for jury service are underrepresented in the downtown jury pool by 50 percent."

The defense attorneys attribute the under representation to two factors:

(1) The Court erroneously dropping names from the "master list." (Apparently, San Diego is moving in the opposite direction of other locales which are looking ever increasingly at ways to expand their lists.); and

(2) The Court giving jurors the option to serve in various parts of the county which are closer to their home.

It is this last factor that is cited by the DA in its letter to the Court questionning the current process. According to the DA, the central judicial district receives 70 percent of the jury summonses; however, it only has 45 percent of the eligible jurors. The DA is calling for the summonses to be sent out county wide in the same proportion as the number of eligible jurors. While this will incovenience many who live far from the downtown area, it will ensure that certain segments of the population are not underpresented in the jury pool.