A ‘glitch’ left young people off jury rolls (opens in new tab)

If the goal of a jury is to be unbiased toward the person on trial (attempt equal representation from the citizenry), wouldn't biasing the selection now violate the right of the defendant to trial by jury of peers as much as the instance in question? We would do well to remember that the objective of jury selection is not to give all groups equal representation simply for the sake of fairness but to give the defendant a fair, unbiased jury for a trial.

It wouldn't be fair to today's defendants to do this, just as some sort of "justice" for those of yesterday.

That doesn't make any sense. There is no right to be a juror; rather, the defendant has a right to a jury of his peers. So the affected defendants deserve compensation, not those excluded from the jury pool.

It says "About 15 percent of Americans are called for jury duty each year". Multiply that by 10x and get 150%. But I thought someone can only be called for jury once per year.

I guess you could increase the chance of being called only for those who haven't been called yet.

I would rather think that past trials would be the ones affected, and then be eligible for retrial.

I can see a reason for it to be the way it (ICE having possible access to a database of foreigners on US soil), but I agree that dealing with repeated problems like this one is exasperating. I think Selective Service does the same thing (occasionally asking foreigners to enlist for US military service by accident).

I've been called for jury duty almost every year since I was 20 (I'm in my late 20s now). It's a frustrating waste of time considering how much lawyers hate engineers being on the jury.

Also 47, sounds similar

- 2 times had to call but wasn't needed

- once, sat in a room waiting but then we were all dismissed

- this year, 2 day jury selection; I ended up in seat #2 on the 2nd day for about 4 hours before being dismissed

For a penalty to be appropriate we'd need to be able to identify a harm to someone. That's a stretch in this case, I think.

I wonder what proportion of judicial districts or jury pools are managed by external companies, and how concentrated their management is - if some large proportion is managed by some very small number of companies.

Now that there is evidence that this sort of thing can happen, it should be a responsibility of the justice system to have regular audits in place to ensure that it stops happening.

You must not know much about public defenders offices, in general they are under funded, and undermanned, and it isn't like there is anyone monitoring the jury composition of every case in the state at any given time.

The problem is compounded by youth being the number one group of people who naturally aren't called for jury duty. You have to be registered to vote, or have a drivers lisc. to even be in the pot to be selected as a possible.

Young people tend to move around a lot more than other segments of the population, so even if they are called, they may no longer be reachable at the address the state has for them, or they have moved out of state entirely and are no longer eligible to be seated.

Many youth, don't have access to reliable transportation to get them to a courthouse even if they are on one of the two list mentioned above.

They are also in one of the largest groups of people, who just flat out refuse to show up.

You also can't be a felon, you have to be literate, and able to read/write/speak English (This is in Louisiana law.) and considering that Louisiana has roughly a 25% youth illiteracy rate.

So it isn't really difficult to see, how this could be overlooked.

And honestly, there isn't a chance in hell that a defense attorney noticed this, and more likely one of the many justice reform groups in Louisiana that found this, or received a tip about the issue.