One afternoon last fall at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse five jury trials were in progress. In courtroom 205 Frederick Calvin, who’s black, was on trial for possession of cocaine with intent to deliver. There were no black men in the jury box. In courtroom 402 Demetrious Allen, also black, was being tried for possession of a stolen motor vehicle by another jury with no black men. In courtroom 604 Javier Perez, a Hispanic man, was on trial for armed robbery. There were no Hispanic men on his jury. In courtroom 700 Miguel Garcia, also Hispanic, was being tried for murder by another jury with no Hispanic men. And in courtroom 201 Chicago police officers Ernest Hutchinson and Rodney Carriger were on trial for home invasion and official misconduct. Hutchinson and Carriger are black, as was one man on their jury. All five judges in the trials were white, as were 16 of the 19 lawyers.
The exclusion might not be systematic, but minorities–especially minority males–are being excluded. In the five trials I surveyed, 16 of the 60 jurors were black or Hispanic–that’s 27 percent in a county whose adult population is 41 percent black or Hispanic. And only 4 of those 16 jurors were male. What I saw wasn’t unusual. Walk into a jury trial in the criminal courthouse at 26th and California on any day, and you’ll likely see a minority male in the defendant’s chair and hardly any minority males in the jury box. That’s true not only in Cook County but in urban courthouses throughout the nation. There’s no simple explanation for this, and no simple solution.
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Minorities are also disproportionately poor, and the poor are less likely to report for jury duty. For one thing, they move more often than people who aren’t poor, so jury summonses can go to the wrong address. Lawyers I spoke with speculated that the working poor feel they can’t afford to give up even minimum-wage earnings for the daily juror stipend of $17.20. They may also fear they’ll jeopardize their jobs if they miss work, even though employers are barred by law from penalizing workers for complying with a summons.
Longhitano, who was a prosecutor in New York before he moved here four years ago, says Manhattan juries were more sympathetic to the defense than Cook County juries, but not because they had more minorities. He says perhaps it was because Manhattan jurors tended to be wealthier and better educated than Cook County jurors. “It was not unusual to have three blue-haired ladies on a jury, and two of them would be PhDs.”
Many jurisdictions have begun keeping statistics on who reports for jury duty as a first step toward making juries more representative. In Contra Costa County, California, people who show up for jury duty are now asked to provide their race, gender, and zip code in an anonymous survey–research that was prompted by lawsuits challenging the makeup of the county’s jury pools. “You need to know something about a problem if you’re going to solve it,” says Sherry Dorfman, chief assistant executive officer of the local branch of the Superior Court of California. But in Cook County, says Evans, “We don’t actually keep statistics on the basis of race or ethnicity or anything like that.”
