Fair Trials Start with Fair Juries
Isabel Petry, a current Drexel COOP at PMC
Imagine you’ve been charged with a crime, any crime. You’ve decided to get a lawyer, exercise your sixth amendment right by going to trial, and face a jury of your peers. This jury will be deciding questions of your liberty—it could even be life or death. Who is sitting in the jury box at your trial? Do they look like you? Are they your neighbors? The people you see at the grocery store?
Emily Coward, Director of the Inclusive Juries Project at Duke University School of Law, invites us to imagine ourselves in the seat of the convicted. At the second event in Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts’ Modern Juries, Modern Courts ™ speaker series on June 10, Coward discussed a true disparity of justice and fairness in our court systems: the jury. She asks, “what would give you confidence when you looked out at how jury selection was playing out that your jury would be fairly deciding your case?”
“Our jury system, I think at this point, is on life support. It is a vanishing right,” Coward discusses. In fact, fewer and fewer of our trials are being decided by a jury. As of 2023, only 2% of felony cases and misdemeanor cases and only 1% of civil cases are decided by jury trial, according to the National Center for State Courts. The voice of the people is a foundational pillar of the justice system. The jury represents the bridge between the complicated justice system and the average American. It’s a critical and necessary aspect of our democracy. But now, those who chose to exercise their right to a fair trial are waiting four to five years for their jury trial. Ultimately, it’s becoming an increasingly difficult right to obtain.
Who ends up serving on the jury? In Pennsylvania, state court jury pools are created from voter registration records, driver license records, revenue department records and other databases. However, U.S. citizens who do not speak English or have limited english understanding, have a mental or physical disability, or have been convicted of a crime punishable for a year or more in jail are ineligible to serve on a jury. But there are more factors to consider. Financial and logistical barriers play a huge part in who can actually serve on a jury. As Coward described, the daily per capita income for the average American is about $144.25. In Pennsylvania, jurors are paid $9 a day and $25 a day after the first three days. Obviously, that’s a huge difference. And that’s not even considering other factors, such as transportation, childcare, elder care, wage workers without PTO, and other overall costs of living. Many Americans are unable to take time away from taking care of their children or elderly, or even from working their jobs, which inadvertently eliminates a huge portion of people who cannot afford to serve on a jury.
So again, who’s serving on our juries? That’s part of the problem—we don’t really know. Emily Coward explained we suffer from a huge lack of transparent jury data, so we’re unable to see if courts are really capturing a fair cross-section of the community. But there’s one thing we definitely know: there is a disproportionate exclusion of jurors of color. Coward breaks it down further, as she described that at each stage of the jury formation process, “the disparate overrepresentation of white community members and underrepresentation of people of color in the community—the problem is exacerbated.” This underrepresentation has severely hurt the credibility and reliability Americans have of not only the jury, but our justice system as a whole.
Coward stated it as a simple fact: “Diverse juries perform better.” Diverse juries conduct fewer bias verdicts, make fewer errors, consider more evidence, and spend more time deliberating. Ultimately, diverse juries have the qualities we would all want to see in our jury. Many groups in Pennsylvania have been trying to better and improve the jury process, like creating tools for juror mental health and support for jurors who speak English as a second language. “There’s work being done, I can see,” Coward claims, “and also, there’s jury practices everywhere, including in Pennsylvania, that are in need of attention and reform.” Making juries more representative of the communities they serve is a step towards a fairer system, one in which we all have a voice.
Interested in learning more? Check out upcoming educational events at www.pmconline.org. Learn more about the Pennsylvania justice system from experts and ambassadors working directly in the field.