For some Georgians, the summonses come as regularly as the dogwoods bloom. Year after year, jury duty calls.
Others find themselves perennially skipped over for jury service.
It can all seem pretty capricious. But that should change a bit after today, when a new statewide jury pool system takes effect.
The new system greatly expands the number of people in the jury pool, thereby giving everyone a fairer shot of getting called to the courthouse. Defense attorneys say that criminal defendants also should benefit from having a more inclusive pool of jurors.
The overhaul puts the Council of Superior Court Clerks of Georgia in charge of creating a list of potential jurors for the state's 159 counties.
The old county-managed system was based on a concept called "forced balancing." Forced balancing mandates that the jury pool makeup matches the race and gender demographics of a county's population. Georgia has relied on the method since the 1970s, but it was the only state in the nation still using it, according to Michael Holiman, executive director of the Georgia Council of Superior Court Clerks.
Whenever the census data did not exactly match the pool, some eligible citizens had to be removed from the list on the basis of their race or gender to achieve the proper demographic balance.
"Then what you've just done is denied an individual the right to serve on a jury," said Holiman. "The Georgia Supreme Court has been doing a delicate dance for several years to avoid declaring all Georgia's juries unconstitutional."
Michael Mears, a professor at John Marshall Law School who is an expert in death penalty defense, said criminal defendants should benefit from an expanded jury pool.
"For challenges based upon race and gender, I think this does achieve a very positive thing," Mears said.
Registering to vote used to make a person more likely to be summoned for jury duty, because counties relied heavily on the voter registration list to construct their jury pool. Some counties would supplement the rolls with names gleaned from other sources like church rosters or high school annuals. Counties were also required by law to draw at least a small sample from the state driver's license database.
The biggest difference is that now the new, more inclusive jury pool list includes the entire state driver's license database.
"This is going to be much better system, because everybody gets an opportunity to serve on a jury," said Georgia Supreme Court Justice Hugh Thompson, who chaired a special state jury commission.
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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