San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Preserve stipends to do justice to jury diversity
Kiswendsida Kola received a postcard this fall with a novel proposition.
It read: “You may be eligible to receive $100 per day for your jury service!” as a participant in a pilot program called Be the Jury.
This offer came as a pleasant surprise to Kola, who, like many San Francisco residents, struggles to balance his willingness to participate in the legal system against the financial imperatives that come with living in one of the least affordable cities.
Be the Jury “showed me the city cares about its residents and its justice system,” said Kola, who participated in the program in September. “As a juror, it allowed me to focus on the case. I didn’t have to think about my basic needs like being able to buy a meal while serving as a juror.”
Be the Jury has been a boon for the city’s civic-minded but cash-strapped residents, according to a new study outlining the pilot project’s first six months. The data also makes a compelling case for the program to be more than a temporary experiment when its initial run ends on Dec. 31, 2023.
The basic idea behind the initiative is that by increasing the daily stipends for low- and moderate-income jurors from $15 to $100 per day, San Francisco will be better positioned to staff juries that are representative of a population that is more than 60% nonwhite. To qualify
for the additional stipend, prospective jurors must earn less than 80% of the area median income ($74,600 for a single person or $106,550 for a family of four).
According to a report by the city’s Financial Justice Project, which investigates how fees and fines affect low-income San Franciscans and communities of color, more than 200 residents have participated in Be the Jury since it began in March. The Financial Justice Project helped develop Be the Jury.
Six out of 10 participants identified as people of color. Nearly half of the jurors (47%) indicated they were currently jobless. And 81% said they wouldn’t have been able to perform jury duty without financial assistance from the program.
As Paula Hannaford-Agor, director of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts, explained to me, San Francisco’s pilot program acknowledges a longsimmering crisis around the perceived integrity of the criminal legal system.
“When people look at the jury pools, and particularly look at the people who are actually serving and see how much financial hardship contributes to underrepresentation of people of color … it raises real questions about whether trial by jury is as fair and as much of a community investment as it’s talked about historically,” she said.
Given the extreme levels of economic inequality in San Francisco, a program like Be the Jury is both timely and necessary.
According to 2016-20 U.S. census statistics, Black residents of San Francisco have one of the city’s lowest median earnings at around $39,000 per year as of 2020, followed by American Indian and Alaska Natives at little under $50,000. The average annual income of white families was about $146,000.
Additionally, the most recent local jury participation data shows that, in 2018 and 2019, 12% of all juror dismissals in San Francisco were for financial reasons.
The San Francisco Superior Court, Public Defender’s Office and District Attorney’s Office, plus the Bar Association of San Francisco, worked together to establish Be the Jury in March; Mayor London Breed is also an advocate.
Perhaps it’s time for San Francisco to reach consensus on the next logical step, which would be to make the pilot permanent, with a funding stream that isn’t reliant solely on money from philanthropic groups.
The two-year San Francisco city and county budget has almost $14 billion allocated for fiscal year 2022-23. Be the Jury could exist on about $500,000 per year, Anne Stuhldreher, the director of the Financial Justice Project, told me.
The second thing that would need to happen is for the legislation that enabled the pilot, AB1452, to be extended and made permanent. San Francisco Assembly Member Phil Ting’s bill calls for a third party to review information voluntarily provided by jurors who get the higher compensation. The bill will sunset at the end of 2023, or sooner if the Superior Court of San Francisco finds that the program is causing “prejudice to the rights of litigants or the interests of justice.”
Kola, who emigrated from West Africa 13 years ago, said his experience with Be the Jury renewed his belief in equity within the city’s justice system.
“Be the Jury is the motor driving San Francisco toward this specific goal,” Kola said. “It tells everybody in the city that the justice system is alive and you can believe in that system because everyone can play a part in improving it.”