Verdict Is Clear in Jurors’ Judgment: Fix the System

In my 37 years as a reporter, I’ve covered everything from presidential elections to murders. But nothing I’ve written has ever generated the number of letters as my recent columns about jury duty.

Not even when I started writing this column four years ago, and began tossing my opinions around, have I gotten such a response. Even now, almost a month after the columns appeared, readers come up to me and tell me that I got it just right. I seemed to have tapped into some real anger around town.

I portrayed myself as a prisoner of the criminal justice system, and quoted a fellow jury pool inmate who said, “They treat the jurors as bad as the people who are charged.”

As I thought about the response, I understood what had caused it. Jury duty is one of the few opportunities to participate in government, to influence events--to make a difference.

For years, I’ve watched underlings bow and scrape before presidents, governors, lawmakers and judges. And so when I became a juror--with a task as important as anything done by a legislator--and I was treated with disrespect, I got mad. So do many others.

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One of the supportive letters came from a veteran of the courts I used to cover when I was a reporter with the Oakland Tribune, retired Judge James A. Walsh, who now lives in Palm Springs.

Walsh, whom I’ve never met, thought my complaints were right on target. “It’s always open season for cheap shots at the jury system, but you were eminently fair,” he wrote. “I’m a 74-year-old geezer, retired after many years as a judge in the criminal courts of Alameda County, and I always thought that the jury system, in general, is the last vestige of involuntary servitude.

“When I was trying jury trials . . . I would come out in shirt sleeves, go to the rail and clue in the panel as to the ‘torture’ they were about to endure. . . . It is also important for the judge to tell prospective jurors that they have the most important role in a jury trial. The judge may sit on high, but 90% of a judge’s duties are taken away . . . and become the duties of each juror, who is to become the sole judge of the facts.”

Stephen R. Judge of Pacific Palisades agreed with my complaints about the jury telephone system. He wrote: “I completed jury service in Santa Monica Superior Court and I vow, ‘Never again.’ ” Jury panelists, he said, are treated “like members of a working party in boot camp, where a vast number of guys are rounded up and mostly left to kill time.”

Judge has a traveling job with a book publisher. He had a trip planned for last November when he received his jury notice. “I tried over and over again to reach somebody at the telephone number to be used for communicating (regarding) jury service. I merely wanted a postponement until January. After a million tries and a busy signal each time, I gave up.” So Judge had to cancel his business trip and appear as ordered.

Like me, Jim Wakeman of West L.A. was upset by delays. “I was on a jury for all but one of my assigned 10 days (good) but ended up serving two or three extra days to complete the trial (not so good). . . . It was common for us to be told to arrive the next day as late at 10:30 a.m., then left standing in the hallway for as long as an hour and a half, then be told to go to lunch for two hours. On such occasions, we were lucky if we got in two hours of actual trial time.

“A solution to the above problem would be for courts to conduct their jury trials the first thing in the morning, release jurors at noon or 1 p.m. and conduct their other matters in the afternoon.”

However, one of the most thoughtful, and certainly the most detailed, letter came from an attorney who said I was completely off base.

That letter, covering 5 1/2 single-spaced pages, came from J. Anthony Vittal, a trial lawyer and president-elect of the Beverly Hills Bar Assn. He said he had hoped I “would be taking the opportunity to educate the public about the long-term consequences of inadequate trial court funding and the fundamental nature of our justice system. My hopes were soon shattered as I read your piece.”

Vittal blamed money shortages for two of my complaints--being forced to sit on hallway floors and continually getting busy signals when I tried to call the jury office. “There simply is not enough money available to enable (trial courts) to operate properly,” he said. The court budget has been cut for three years while fees imposed on plaintiffs and defendants have been sharply increased.

Vittal also disagreed with my comments about “the slowness of the court system, by lawyers’ love of procedure, by long and often tedious questioning.”

He replied that “lawyers have a duty, imposed on them by law, of undivided loyalty to their clients. Thus lawyers collectively refuse to permit these rights to be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency. . . . Do you want to be a litigant in a system without these safeguards?”

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Most of the letter writers, even critic Vittal, said I should follow up with more columns on the subject. “I hope that, after reading this letter, you will take the opportunity to explore these issues further and lend your support to the ongoing efforts of the bench and bar to ameliorate the problems and improve the situation,” Vittal said.

I see myself as more of a renegade than an ally of judges and lawyers. But certainly the system has to be fixed. It’s just about the only time average people come in contact with the court system unless they are unfortunate enough to personally be involved in a trial as a plaintiff, a defendant or a witness.

And as retired Judge Walsh pointed out, when the jurors begin to deliberate they become the most important people in the courtroom. Given their importance, they should be treated with more respect. In the future, I’ll take a look at some ideas on how this might be accomplished.