Defense attorneys were astonished — and U.S. District Judge James Zagel called the development rare — when 50 prospective jurors entered a federal courtroom for William Beavers’ trial and not one was an African-American man.
Yet less than two months earlier in the same courthouse, 45 prospective jurors had filed into U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur’s courtroom for the drug conspiracy trial of another African-American defendant. Just one was black.
In each instance, defense attorneys cited the racial imbalance in asking that the panel be dismissed and a new one randomly selected. The two veteran judges weighed the legal issues before them but came to opposite conclusions: Zagel retained his panel, while Shadur ordered a new group in.
“I was really startled,” Shadur recalled in a telephone interview about the nearly all-white jury panel. “I sent the jury back to the jury room, and we had a new jury a few days later that had a better degree of representation.”
Both trials underscore the struggles facing federal courts across the country in trying to randomly select juries that fairly reflect the racial diversity of their communities. Even as the Beavers trial brought the controversy to light, officials at the federal court in Chicago were preparing to draw names from driver’s license and state ID records to add to the traditional voter rolls. The move represents the most significant change to the jury selection process for Chicago’s federal court in at least two decades and is expected to increase the representation of blacks and Hispanics on juries.
Other districts confronted with similar issues have taken even more dramatic action.
“You want, especially on the outset, (for) this thing to not only be fair but look fair,” said David Coar, an African-American who sat on the federal bench for 16 years. “This court system depends on people believing that you get a fair shake.”
Chicago’s federal district court, officially known as the Eastern Division of the Northern District of Illinois, encompasses racially diverse Cook County and mostly white DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kendall, Lake and LaSalle and Will counties.
For decades, the district has relied on voter registration lists to randomly assemble a large group of prospective jurors in a process mandated by Congress in 1968 to eradicate the handpicked juries that had led to the systematic exclusion of African-Americans and other minorities.
That group is composed of 50,000 residents from the eight counties, a list commonly referred to by court officials as the “master jury wheel.” The selection of the names is weighted by population, meaning greater numbers of prospective jurors come from the more populous Cook County and Chicago.
The federal court uses the list for two years to seat juries for hundreds of trials at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
As part of the process, court officials regularly mail out to a random cross-section of the pool a questionnaire intended to weed out those unqualified to serve on juries — including those who aren’t U.S. citizens, don’t understand English well enough or are under 18.
Prospective jurors who return the questionnaires and meet all the requirements are then selected at random and ordered to report to court on a specific date. At that point, a computer again randomly selects which prospective jurors, called a panel, to send to the courtroom to be questioned and potentially picked to sit in judgment at criminal or civil trials.
How well minorities have been represented on Chicago federal juries is not clear. The clerk’s office said it needed a court order to release any juror data.
Other federal courts have identified many reasons why minorities are underrepresented on jury panels.
For one, the databases used to come up with potential jurors might not accurately reflect the diversity of the community, according to Paula Hannaford-Agor, an expert with the National Center for State Courts on jury system management. She pointed to a U.S. Census Bureau study of 2008 voting data that found that registered voters tend to be older, white and more affluent than the general population.
To improve the odds of drawing more minority jurors, courts can supplement voter rolls with other databases, Hannaford-Agor said.
Income, education and employment also play a role in why more minorities don’t wind up on juries, she said. Studies have found that those at lower socio-economic levels might miss a court mailing because they moved. They also don’t respond to jury summons because they don’t understand the process or have financial hardships. A larger percentage of minorities fall into that group, Hannaford-Agor said.
The District of Massachusetts, which uses resident lists from which to find jurors, discovered that wealthier towns with fewer minorities kept more accurate records than more diverse cities such as Boston. As a result, many jury summonses sent to cities with a higher percentage of minorities went unanswered or were returned as nondeliverable because residents had moved.
To try to remedy the discrepancy, the district began mailing a new summons to another resident in the same ZIP code if the summons came back as undelivered.
“We really exposed something that we didn’t know about,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who presided over a death penalty case that prompted a study of the Massachusetts system.
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