Quotas For Service As a Juror Does Damage to the Court System

It seems to me we have just done some real damage to the jury system in our local courts. Serious damage. Our judicial system says we all have a right to a trial by a jury of our peers. In the politically correct world in which we now live, various courts have ruled that a jury pool must be "balanced" by gender, race and ethnic background. Jurors also must be American citizens, and since the language of the courts is English, they should also be fluent in English. But primarily they must be your peers, which generally is considered to say they are other American citizens living in your community. That's all other Americans living in your community.

Well, because Hall County did not have the right quota of Latinos following the 2000 census, the entire jury pool was challenged. The census showed 17 percent of Hall Countians were Latinos of jury age, but did not give the number who were U. S. citizens or the number who have a full understanding of English. Some unofficial marketing studies of our area indicate only two percent of local Latinos are citizens, with the remainder divided between those who are in the U. S. legally and the rest illegals. A study of the names in the Hall County voter list found only about one percent with Latino names. But our politically correct courts say we must have 7 percent Latinos in our jury pool.

The damage, however, is not in the increase in Latinos in the jury pool. The damage is that to get the so-called "correct" percentage, we threw 80 percent of the other potential jurors out of the pool ... four out of five. The previous jury pool had 39,297 of your peers in it. The new one has only 6,726. A total of 32,571 people were thrown out of the jury pool. It seems to me we had a much better chance of drawing a balanced jury pool of our peers from 39,000 randomly selected people than from the 6,000 that fulfill quotas.

No matter what the reasons are, it seems to me we have done some pretty serious damage to our judicial system by setting quotas for the jury pool.

This is Gordon Sawyer, and may the wind always be at your back.