Low pay for jurors makes it difficult to accommodate a jury of peers

From Denise AmmosCalmness

This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

A man from San Diego, accused of murder, went to court for four weeks earlier this year. After closing the arguments, the jurors, closed, were examined hundreds of exhibits photos and fits again in hours of testimony before finding the man guilty on most accusations.

Before leaving the jury room, we released our anonymity and shared a little about ourselves.

Some jurors were owners of business or managers. One was a nurse. Two of us worked in the media. There was an interior decorator, an accountant, a researcher and a computer analyzer.

Almost everyone had visited or graduated college. White people have compiled about half of the court.

In contrast, the defendant, a Latin American man, had the equivalent of secondary education and has long been unemployed. Prosecutors painted him as a long -time abuser and a drug dealer. He denied killing his nephew.

We considered him innocent until the evidence proved him guilty. Still, as I descended down the courtroom’s escalator for the last time, I couldn’t shake a stinging question: Were we really jurors to his peers?

It was not a rhetorical question. It is now especially German because the legislators of California and the governor just killed an 8-month program that had to help guarantee more diverse jury pools so that the defendants could be tried by their peers.

The courts have long interpreted the “peer jury” standard to mean a “equal” jury, randomly taken by a pool, which includes a “wide range of population, more special in race, national origin and gender”, according to a “wide range of population, more special in the population,” Law.comis an online legal dictionary.

But while about 9 out of 10 defendants across the country are too poor to afford lawyersMost jurors are not in such a low group of income. I found this firsthand. And for decades, prosecutors have used so -called unobstructed challenges – Challenges that do not need a reason – to manipulate the composition of the jurors.

Public defenders say that Forces even innocent customers to accept deals with legal basisInstead of standing against a jury, which is not like them. This is not justice.

Even some prosecutors in California recognize that the courts will be more fair with more diverse jury panels. Still, the state withdraws from the strategy of common sense to correct it.

Gavin Newsom recently acquired $ 27.5 million from the state budget This funds a two -year pilot program, paying $ 100 a day to jurors serving in Alamed, El Dorado, Freshno, Imperial, Monterey, San Bernardino and Shasta.

The seven counties are part of a study. Proponents hoped that the higher payment of the jurors would be distributed throughout California, but the legislators did not target a penny to it in the budget for the next year.

Currently, the California courts pay $ 15 a day. The idea behind the experimental promotion that the Newsom signed a law in 2022 was to check that a better pay leads to a more raky and economically diverse court hearings.

It was modeled after a similar program began in San Francisco in 2021, which increased the pay to $ 100 for lower-income jurors. After a year, more than 8 in 10 program participants said they would not be able to serve jurors without this money.

It would certainly make a difference in the selection of the jury in which I participated.

Selecting a jury when there are “unnecessary difficulties”

The judge called for the jurors of nearly 110 people in the San Diego murder process. He explained that many people and two full days were needed to eventually choose 12 jurors and four deputies for a criminal case, which is expected to last for several weeks.

Some future jurors will not serve because of “unnecessary difficulties,” he said. Too many employers refuse to pay workers on duty. California law says that employers cannot fire the workers who serve jurors, but it does not make employers pay them.

Therefore California sequentially completes jurors with retirees or people who work in jobs with white collar or have money to go without pay. Equal justice is just an empty promise if a minimum wage worker earns eight times more than the jurors make in one day.

Add to this, the costs of jurors can easily exceed the daily pay. In San Diego, the jurors who were driving had to pay for parking- it’s from $ 25 to $ 40 a day and pay for lunch that was moving about $ 20 in nearby restaurants. I drove the cart and packed lunch to save money.

During my first two days of debt to jurors, people described their financial difficulties. A young man told the judge – to everyone – that he had been unemployed for months and was still looking for a job. A woman complained that she could not afford a few weeks of child care. Another man was not sure he would keep his job in two weeks when the jurors duty.

None of them was elected jurors.

In addition to finance, certain life experiences may be factors for the formation of jurors. In this test, the jury’s 108-member pool received a survey of 75 issues intended to identify bias.

Some questions made me suspect that I could be disqualified, such as the question of whether I or a family member was a victim of a crime. Yes, my mother was forcibly enchanted years ago, I wrote and the police did not arrest anyone.

I answered yes to the question if anyone in my family was arrested. When my brother was Preteen, he was caught entering an abandoned factory with friends. He took an agreement on a legal basis and stayed out of prison, but knowing how few black guys received breaks, I was horrified for him, I wrote.

As I scratched my answers, I wondered how many other jurors have similar answers? Will the negative experience with the police make us inappropriate?

There were other, more common potential disqualifiers: I am a black woman, so a lawyer may assume that I do not trust the police or courts. And I am a journalist, a profession, often excluded from jurors for various reasons.

Read more: Another professional group in California wants a free pass from the jurors’ duty. This legislator says no
I was surprised by how much they kept this opinion. But a woman to me whispered that not everyone was taking principled stands; Some just thought he could get them out of the duties of the jurors.

After reading the questionnaires, the judge questioned us. By the time he reached me, about a dozen people – including a few white people – told the judge that they were no A confident person who can get a fair shake in the legal system.

The judge drew me for my family’s meetings with the police. He asked a point if I thought my brother was treated fairly by the court. I told him that since my brother didn’t have to serve prison, he might have been.

I guess my answer was acceptable. When the judge empowered the jurors and sent the rest to the home, I was the last jurisor.

The right to a court hearing is so vital that it is stated in the Constitution and has been for rights. But the search for jury from peers does not mean that the defendants of men will only be tried by men or asians by Asians or Afro -American Afro -American. This means that the court cannot deliberately exclude anyone because of a race or gender.

This is not far enough for me. California should facilitate the employees of the jurors, especially those who come from the world where the defendant lives.

If it costs California $ 27 million to try to reach this standard in seven counties, it’s worth it.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.