San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Proposal to increase pay for diverse, fairer juries
I’ve heard several stories from San Francisco Public Defender Manohar Raju about his courtroom experiences over the years. One that’s stuck is about a Black man who was dismissed from serving on a jury because he lived in Bayview, the same neighborhood as the defendant.
Before leaving the courtroom, the man criticized the jury’s lack of diversity.
“He said he didn’t see anyone that was African American, he didn’t see anyone that was from the Bayview, and because of this, he didn’t see how the process was going to be fair,” Raju told me recently. “People started clapping for him.”
Applause isn’t common during the jury selection process. Concerns about racial equity are.
Discrimination has been an enduring part of America’s criminal justice system for centuries. When it comes to who is picked to determine guilt or innocence, this sacred responsibility has been withheld from women and people of color until fairly recently. Women were still being kept off state juries until
“The size of your wallet or who your employer is shouldn’t impact your right to serve on a jury. We’re trying to make sure our system of justice serves everyone fairly.”
Anne Stuhldreher, director of Financial Justice Project, which raised philanthropic money that would finance Be the Jury
1973, and courts were allowed to ban prospective jurors based solely on their race as recently as 1986.
This multigenerational disenfranchisement hasn’t been fixed by a few belated rulings or laws, and the laughably low financial reimbursement for serving on a jury prevents many workingclass individuals from performing their civic duty.
Which is why it’s time to introduce the concept of reparations to the ongoing work of jury reform.
That’s a scary word in America, where nearly twothirds of people oppose the idea of financial reparations for descendants of slaves, according to a nationwide University of Massachusetts Amherst/WCVB poll released in April. But it’s a concept that may actually be tested, if not outright named, if California passes a bill intended to address class inequities in jury service.
This year, Assembly Member Phil Ting introduced AB1452. The San Francisco Democrat’s bill would create a pilot program called Be the Jury, which would raise the perday pay for lowincome jurors from $15 to $100 starting in 2022 and stopping before the end of 2023. Funded by philanthropic groups, one of the pilot’s goals is to improve racial and economic diversity in juries.
That’s certainly been a problem in San Francisco, where approximately 3,800 lowincome residents were excused from jury service due to financial hardship in 2018 and 2019, according to the Financial Justice Project, an initiative within the city treasurer’s office that evaluates how fines and fees impact residents. Financial dismissals accounted for 12% of all jury excusals in that time. Meanwhile, data from the Bay Area Equity Atlas shows that 59% of Black families and 53% of Latino families qualified as “very low income” last year because they earned less than 50% of the area median income.
“The size of your wallet or who your employer is shouldn’t impact your right to serve on a jury,” said Anne Stuhldreher, the director of the Financial Justice Project, which raised the philanthropic money that would finance Be the Jury.“We’re trying to make sure our system of justice serves everyone fairly.”
Having a truly reflective crosssection of society represented in the jury box matters.
Diverse juries spend more time in deliberations and are less likely to presume a defendant’s guilt, according to an influential 2006 study by Tufts University psychology Professor Sam Sommers. During a recent phone call, Sommers told me jury diversity shouldn’t be considered a “magic bullet” to address disproportionate incarceration rates. But it might influence “the perceived legitimacy” of a criminal justice system by the people who feel most targeted by it.
“When one sees juries that are not diverse, that tends to undermine the general public’s faith in the legitimacy of the system, and probably more so among certain demographics,” he said. “I’m not sure your average white citizen is attuned to that perhaps as your average Black, Latino or Asian citizen might be.”
The state I grew up in, Louisiana, has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the country. More than half of the folks behind bars are Black despite making up onethird of Louisiana’s population. So when I received my first jury summons at the age 19, I jumped at the opportunity.
The details of the trial have blurred with time, but what I remember clearly is how our jury pored over the case for days. We ultimately found the defendant guilty of a parole violation, but it was by no means an easy decision. The experience made me feel like I had influence on a system that historically didn’t care about people like me.
In a way I was fortunate because I had enough financial support to spend two weeks focused on nothing else but the case before me. I couldn’t have done that if I was trying to get by on minimum wage.
In San Francisco, the hourly minimum wage is $16.32. For the daily juror pay to reflect this, Be the Jury would need to increase its $100 perday pay to $130.56. Of course it would take more philanthropy to accomplish this, but San Francisco, which has a billionaire for almost every one of its 49 square miles, shouldn’t have a problem covering the gap.
If we really want juries to represent all colors and classes, then we need to reimburse people for the sacrifice we’re asking them to make. If you don’t want to call it “reparations,” then fine. Think of it as fair pay for civic services rendered.