I happened across a fellow blogging as Gideon over at Public Defender, who has a note about a recent report that says, among other things, that Connecticut has the longest average time to select juries for both serious criminal tries and civil trials. Gideon says that’s a Good Thing.
On the whole, I agree (although he does not recognize that there is a cost as well as a benefit to a luxurious selection process), but I agree that it’s a Good Thing that we take as much time as we need, rather than it being a Good Thing that we’re first. If we took the right amount of time, and Massachusetts or New York took longer, well, good for us. Being first is meaningless. Or, rather, ranking first is only meaningful in context; it’s possible, for instance, that the reason we are first is due to inefficiencies rather than beneficial policies, and that we could learn from the states ranked second and third. Or that the third-ranked state could learn from us. In a national survey, though, keep in mind that some state was going to be ranked first.
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the ED in ’08 site, which features rather prominently some state-by-state statistics about average performance on standardized tests, including rank. Now, I don’t trust averages, and I don’t trust standardized tests, so I wasn’t super inclined to pay much attention anyway, but I noticed that (f’r’ex) CT is ranked fourth in 4th grade reading and ninth in 4th grade math. In eighth grade, we rank seventeenth in reading and ninth in math. Which means ... er ... what, again? Is our early reading education good and our education for 9-13 years not as good? Or are there thirteen states that suck at early reading education but have terrific remedial programs for middle school? Or something else entirely?
There are useful things that ranks can start you toward. If a group of states were ranked near each other in 1997, and one was no longer near the others by 2002, you could look into why. It might be policies implemented in those years. Or demographics. Or the economy. But it would be worth looking into. Similarly, if a region seems to all be ranked near each other, it would be worth looking into other correlations. Is it local policy? Federal policy? Is it movement between states? Is it the weather? But there could well be something looking into.
What isn’t helpful is to be shocked—shocked—that somebody is last. Of course somebody is going to be last. The question is whether they suck, and if they suck, then that’s a problem, whether they are last or twenty-fifth.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
On first glance, the number of hours to pick a jury has nothing to do with the speed of justice — an extra delay of 5-10 hours is nothing compared to the routine delay of trials for years.
But we don’t have enough judges, courtrooms, or court personnel in many areas. When I was on a felony jury, the entire trial took about 8 hours of court time. Choosing a jury took about 2 hours. Under that system, in Massachusetts, defendants are under massive pressure to give up their right to a jury trial. They are lied to by their lawyers, denied lawyers at all, railroaded by judges, and threatened with guaranteed delays of months or years and much harsher punishment if they demand a jury trial. The entire court system can only handle jury trials for 1 out of 100 defendants. Our criminal justice system does not include a meaningful right to trial by jury if 99% of defendants cannot have one.
CT’s system doubles the amount of court time that a typical jury trial takes. That difference in how juries are selected means that only half as many defendants can get jury trials, given that courts operate on relatively fixed resources. If that seems ok, it’s only because the system is so hopelessly broken already, with so few defendants getting a jury trial that it’s ok to let a few luxuriate in a carefully chosen jury in exchange for a few others not getting a jury trial at all. Small numbers, so who cares?
Your points about rankings are ones I agree with. But on the issue of jury selection, rankings have nothing to do with why the facts about CT are so disturbing. It’s not that CT is at an extreme, it’s that it’s such a huge outlier. It’s not that the hours required for jury selection are an abstract number, it’s that they are a huge percentage of the total time spent on trials. And it’s not that the implication is CT has to spend more resources on the justice system, it’s that fundamental Constitutional rights are denied to an even greater number of defendants because of CT’s jury selection practices.
Gideon looks at the issue in the context of the individual case that has gotten to a jury trial, and trying to get his client a fair shake in that case. But it’s at the expense of many other defendants.
I see your point, although of course the half-hour jury selection process in South Carolina isn’t necessarily giving defendants their fundamental Constitutional rights.
It doesn’t look like the survey includes the percentage of trials that have juries, although even that number wouldn’t really tell us a lot about the extent of coercion. I should drop Gideon a note asking about it.
Anyway, I think the question of resources is what underlies Gideon’s and your take on the jury-selection issue. If Connecticut is an outlier because it devotes twice the resources to give defendants a fair trial, it is a Good Thing (although of course those are resources not used elsewhere, etc, etc), but if it is an outlier because it devotes twice the resources to a handful of cases, then it’s a Bad Thing. The survey doesn’t address the question, although it certainly ought to have.
Thanks,
-V.
Sure, the trappings of a jury trial are not sufficient to claim that the right to a jury trial has been honored. But when there’s no jury at all, there definitely has not been a jury trial.
While it primarily focuses on federal courts and civil cases, I’d recommend reading VANISHING TRIALS, VANISHING JURIES, VANISHING CONSTITUTION from the Suffolk University Law Review in 2006. The author discusses some of the philosophy behind having jury trials.
There were over 14,000,000 arrests in the United States in 2005, and only about 70,000 of those were federal cases. Sources: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_29.html and http://www.uscourts.gov/judbus2005/contents.html
This fits moderately well with state court prosecutors reporting that they closed about 10,000,000 criminal cases in 2005. Of those, approximately 1/2 of 1% were resolved by a jury trial. Source: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/psc05.htm
And combining those numbers suggests that if you are arrested, the odds of you getting a jury trial are about 300:1 against.