Tag Archives: Randall County grand jury

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Stop griping about jury duty

Jury box Photo by Jason Doiy 2-9-11 054-2011

My friends keep griping about getting jury summonses.

“I don’t have time,” they say. “Why don’t they just quit calling on me?” they ask. “Aww, what a nuisance,” some have actually said.

If only I’d get picked for a jury. My life would be a little more complete.

Alas, it’ll never happen.

I’ve long ached for the chance to serve on a trial jury. I get maybe two or three such summonses a year from Randall County. They usually come from the District Clerk’s Office, which means they could be looking for jurors to sit on a felony criminal trial.

Oh, I wish I could get the call.

It’s not that I consider myself a model citizen, or a paragon of civic pride. It’s just that I’ve long considered jury duty to be one of citizenship’s primary responsibilities. Someone gets into trouble, has to stand trial and he or she deserves to be tried by an impartial jury of citizens.

But almost every time I’ve ever received a summons, I’ve called the evening before and the automated system tells me all potential jurors have been excused.

Damn!

I did get a jury summons one time, not long after moving to Amarillo. It came from the 47th District Court. I reported that morning, went to the jury waiting room and then, well, waited for about three hours. Then the judge, David Gleason, came out and told us we were excused.

I was crushed.

That was when I was working full time for the local newspaper. A colleague of mine told me I’d likely never be chosen because the nature of my job — as editor of the opinion section of the paper — meant I knew too much about too many things to be considered “qualified” to serve on a trial jury. Well, that was his view. Not mine.

Then came the deal-breaker. I got a chance to serve on a grand jury. This is the panel that decides whether someone committed a crime that deserves to be prosecuted. We met several weeks and indicted dozens of individuals; we also no-billed many others, meaning that the complaint brought to us by the district attorney didn’t merit a trial.

However, before we started our work, Randall County Criminal District Attorney James Farren told us something that has stuck to me like Gorilla Glue. If any of us ever thought about getting picked for a trial jury, he said, we can kiss that notion good bye. It isn’t going to happen. Why? Farren said our service on the grand jury would label us as biased toward the prosecution.

Huh? But, I can be impartial. Honest, man.

Too bad. The DA said we were tainted by our grand jury service.

I’d trade places in a minute with those who gripe about getting a jury summons.

If only …

legal news, local news, State news

Texas grand jury system under review

The Texas criminal justice system has this strange idea about how to select trial juries and grand juries.

Grand jurors are chosen in most counties by jury commissioners, who are selected by a presiding judge; the commissioners then look for people they believe are “qualified” to serve on a panel that determines whether a criminal complaint should result in officials charges brought against someone. The issue is whether a grand juror can commit to meet over the course of several weeks to make these determinations.

Trial jurors are selected at random. District clerks go through voter registration rolls to find people whose names are put into a large pool of potential jurors. The only qualification is that they be residents of the county and be of sound mind, etc.

Here’s an interesting aspect of the selection processes. The state believes it is fine to select someone at random, and then ask that person to determine whether some lives or dies if that individual is convicted of a capital crime. But a grand jury requires more of a screening process to find individuals who can serve on that panel.

Texas legislators are considering a bill that would make the grand jury selection system look more like the trial jury selection method.

I say, “Go for it, lawmakers.”

Back in 1984, when I arrived in Texas, the newspaper where I worked at the time, the Beaumont Enterprise, was involved in an editorial campaign to change the grand jury selection system. There had been questions raised about whether a particular grand jury had been chosen because grand jurors had a particular bias. The paper raised all kinds of heck with the two judges in Jefferson County with criminal jurisdiction. We argued vehemently that the system needed to be changed. Over time, the judges heeded our calls and changed to a random selection method.

State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, thinks the state should require a random method in all 254 Texas counties.

He says the system needs total confidence in all its working parts. As The Associated Press reported, the current system is ridiculed as a “pick a pal” system in which friends pick friends to serve on a grand jury.

Now, for the record, I once served on a grand jury in Randall County. I was asked by a friend, who was serving as a jury commissioner for the 181st District Court, presided over by Judge John Board.

I agreed. Board chose me along with several other people and we met regularly for three months. We confronted no controversy during our time and our service ended without a whimper of discontent.

That particular grand jury worked well. The threat, though, of dysfunction created by potential bias has created a need for the Texas Legislature to change the selection system.

If the random selection method is able to seat people who then can determine whether someone should die for committing a crime, then it will work to select people who can decide whether to charge someone with a crime.