Bill proposed by state Sen. Scott Wiener would add more citizens of color, and those with lower incomes, to jury pools.
Juries would be drawn from a larger pool of Californians under a bill proposed by state legislators eager to add more people of color and lowincome residents to the courtroom panels that decide criminal cases and lawsuits.
The state now draws jurors largely from residents who are registered to vote or have a driver’s license or identification card from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Reform advocates say that too often, that results in panels overstocked with white jurors who are relatively welloff.
SB592 by state Sen. Scott Wiener, DSan Francisco, seeks to expand the pool by also drawing jurors from among everyone who files income tax returns.
Supporters of the bill say people of color and poorer residents are less likely to register to vote or drive a car.
“That excludes big swathes of our community and it results in juries that are less diverse and less representative,” Wiener said during a Zoom news conference Wednesday. “If you don’t have a jury of your peers, a jury that is truly a crosssection of our diverse communities, then it is very hard for someone accused of a crime to get a fair trial.”
He said the state’s taxfiling database includes a “much broader universe” of people, including those who claim the earnedincome tax credit, an assistance program for lowincome filers.
The bill is one of several criminaljustice reform measures that legislators have proposed since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody and the subsequent national protests over officer brutality and systemic racism.
Advocates of criminaljustice reform say Californians, particularly African Americans, are often denied their constitutional right to a trial by a jury of peers because their cases are decided by unrepresentative juries. Wiener’s bill is sponsored by the California Public Defenders Association and several reform advocacy groups.
Oscar Bobrow, president of the California Public Defenders Association and Solano County’s chief deputy public defender, said he has watched disproportionately white juries decide the fate of minority defendants over a 35year career.
“I have sat next to client after client, in trial after trial” where the jury wasn’t representative, Bobrow said. “They need to be able to see people who look like them.”
State Sen. Nancy Skinner, DBerkeley, proposed similar legislation last year that failed. She said California must fix a system where jurors are typically wealthier and whiter than “most of the people who they are sitting there to judge.”
Wiener’s office doesn’t have an estimate of how many Californians would be added as potential jurors under the bill, but a spokeswoman said it would be “significant.”
Wiener said the measure has no formal opposition. But lawmakers are under a tight timeline to consider it because they’re scheduled to adjourn for the year Aug. 31, and they’re on recess now because of the coronavirus pandemic.
If the bill passes, California would join a growing number of states that use tax rolls to summon jurors. Nineteen states have adopted the practice, according to the National Center for State Courts.
Wiener has campaigned against unrepresentative jury pools for years. In 2017, he unsuccessfully carried a bill that sought to require jury commissioners to collect demographic data on all prospective jurors to expose inequities.
Wiener said SB592 is one of several bills he expects to introduce to address racism in the justice system.
“In so many respects the system is poorly designed, it is failing and it is one more example of the structural racism in this country,” he said.