Voting and serving on a jury are the two principal ways Americans directly participate in the democratic process. But while the District of Columbia’s voter turnout in the last presidential election was one of the highest in the nation (72 percent), unfortunately the same cannot be said about the city’s response to summons for jury duty. In fact, only 18 percent of D.C. residents actually show up for jury duty, a rate even lower than Baltimore’s.
The large number of no-shows greatly diminishes the pool of potential jurors and causes major hardships for those who do heed the call — and are then asked to put their personal and work lives on hold again much sooner than would otherwise be necessary. This isn’t fair to them or to defendants who have the right not to have their cases considered by resentful jurors.
However, a recently released two-year study by the National Center for State Courts found that much of the “jury yield” problem is not so much that 4 in 5 city residents refuse to serve, but that a master juror list provided to the courts by five key city agencies has so many wrong addresses. For example, researchers found that many residential addresses provided were in the 20566 ZIP code, although, as they wryly noted, “it is not expected that anyone lives at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” They also found that a rapid increase in the amount of “undeliverable” mail suggested that “half the population moves or at least changes address[es] every year.” While some D.C. neighborhoods are more transient than others, even Washingtonians don’t move that often.
Even more disturbing is the large number of duplicate names generated by the Board of Elections, which is supposed to keep up-to-date voter lists. While lists from other departments contained some duplicate names, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles (326) and the Office of Tax and Revenue (950), BOE submitted 19,198 duplicate names and another 64,130 lacking Social Security numbers that had to be eliminated by the study’s authors. In a city with a population of just 550,521, that’s a pretty high percentage of bad or incomplete voter data.
Not surprisingly, “Improving Juror Response Rates” recommends “more effective management of the government lists” used as sources for potential jurors, including lists of personal income taxpayers, driver’s licenses and nondriver ID cards, registered voters, and unemployment insurance and welfare recipients. Updating and verifying this important information — and sharing it with other city agencies in a much more timely manner — should be one of the District’s top priorities.
The study also pointed out that nonresponders were given the same two-year respite from jury duty as those who actually served on one. This should be reversed. Nonresponders’ names should remain on the active jury list until these people are either located and ordered to perform their duty or deleted for cause. They certainly shouldn’t get a two-year pass for doing nothing.
