Jurors being summoned for trials across California

Jury services across the state are resuming after months of delay, but with varying social distancing solutions, the California Judicial Council announced Friday.

Riverside and Yolo counties are providing potential jurors with online alternatives for checking in or claiming hardships, instead of requiring them to physically appear at courthouses.

Some courts with limited space, like those in Merced, Placer, and Tulare counties, are asking prospective jurors to report for jury service at gymnasiums, auditoriums, or other large spaces outside of the courthouse, the council said Friday.

Riverside County Presiding Judge John W. Vineyard, who began sending jury summonses in May, said while the juror response rate is down by roughly 5%, it is better than expected.

"Right now, our appearance rate in Riverside is about 30%, so it's somewhere around the 5% mark lower than pre-Covid days," Vineyard said in a phone interview Friday. "I will say this, it is much, much better than I was fearful of. I was worried we would have a much higher failure to appear rate."

One jury trial has already been completed in Riverside, and at least six others are ongoing throughout the county, which is "pretty close to capacity, with the social distancing requirements," Vineyard said.

Yolo County Presiding Judge Samuel T. McAdam said his court has not begun jury trials yet but summonses were sent June 1 with the expectation the trials would begin July 6.

Potential jurors will be able to report or claim hardship via Zoom in Yolo County. However if zoom is unavailable, they will have to report directly to court, McAdam said in a phone interview Friday. Perhaps a bigger unknown is the number of potential jurors claiming hardship, he said.

"The good faith people who actually show up, either through Zoom or in person, they're going to be claiming hardship," McAdam said. "They're trying to get back to work, or they're financially strapped or they have a sick person at home, and they can't leave or they're sick themselves. So that is going to be a big unknown and a big factor as to whether we can get enough jurors."

Courts in most counties are only hearing high-priority criminal jury trials due to the backlog created by the shutdown. For most counties, civil trials are not expected to resume until October at earliest.

Criminal Jury trials in Los Angeles County are currently scheduled to resume the week of July 13, a court spokeswoman said by email Friday. Summons have been issued but the juror yield is not yet known, she said. The normal juror response rate is about 30% in the county.

Los Angeles County Presiding Judge Kevin Brazile, who was unavailable for comment Friday, said he was concerned fearful jurors may not want to show up for service, and that civil trials may not begin in his court until 2021, during a zoom teleconference in early June.

"We have to convince the jurors to come back to us," Brazile said.

Despite courts opening up, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he may hit the pause bottom on further reopening of the economy during a press conference Thursday, if coronavirus infections continue to rise in California.

Responding to the prospect of a continued surge impacting jury summons, spokesperson Blaine Corren of the Judicial Council said, "The chief justice and the council reserve the authority to rescind or modify their orders or emergency rules of court, as appropriate, to address changing circumstances of the emergency pandemic."

While the council has the authority to issue a statewide order or even a county by county order restricting jury summons, right now it is in the hands of individual counties, McAdam said.

"I've decided here in Yolo not to delay any further, but things are changing fast and this week is raising some concerns," he said.

Vineyard, who said Riverside County has been hit especially hard by Covid-19, may also consider changing court policy on jury summons if conditions worsen, he said.

"Bottom line, we expected the failure to appear rate to be higher than it is based on the news about Covid and the numbers going up," he said. "The news in Riverside is particularly troubling and so we fully expected people not to appear. We're getting more people than we expected and that is a good thing. If the news keeps getting bad, that may change and we will have to adapt one way or the other."