Adding licensed drivers brings hundreds of thousands more potential jurors into the fold. For example, when Cherokee County used the forced balancing system, there were about 12,000 in the jury pool, said Cherokee County Clerk of Court Patty Baker. Now there are about 190,000.
DeKalb’s jury pool size more than tripled from about 200,000 to 735,206 because of the switchover, said DeKalb County Superior Court Administrator Cathy McCumber.
Atlanta resident Tori White, 33, who has been called for jury duty in Fulton County three times in the past 11 years, said the common gripe among her fellow jurors was that they had all been pressed into service too often. Some counties, like Cherokee, currently have at least a seven-year gap between jury service, but other jurisdictions have no such requirement. State law doesn’t specify how many times a person can be called for jury duty. It only mandates that jurors cannot be asked to serve more than four weeks in any given year.
Even though White, who is an attorney, is delighted to get a summons because she likes jury duty, she said the new system sounds like a step in the right direction.
“Perhaps now it may not be so much the chore that it is for some people,” said White.
Local court officials, however, are anxious about what they expect to be a bumpy transition.
Court administrators in Cherokee, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties said they have taken the precautionary measure of using their old jury pool list to summon enough jurors to handle the next three or four more months worth of jury trials, hoping in the meantime that wrinkles in the new system will be ironed out.
“We’re going to try to make it as painless to the juror as possible, but there is going to be a learning curve all the way around,” said Cobb County Superior Court Clerk Tom Charron.
That’s mainly because using the driver’s license database to form the new pool has created a number of duplicate names in the system. The driver’s license database also includes non-citizens, who won’t be eligible to serve.
Many motorists neglect to update their addresses when they move, so that’s another hurdle that counties expect to encounter.
The state has tried to purge outdated information by cross-referencing driver records with the national change of address database, said Thompson. However, local court officials are still expecting to have a higher number of summonses returned as undeliverable.
To compensate, all the metro Atlanta courts said they would be mailing out extra summonses to make sure they get enough respondents.
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