Diversity plan for juries called a first step

A newly adopted plan aimed at getting more African-Americans on federal juries in Massachusetts was hailed yesterday as "a positive first step" by one of the lawyers who argued that it is unfair that so many young, black men from Boston and other cities are tried before all-white juries drawn largely from the suburbs.

Under the new plan instituted March 1, when a jury summons is returned as undeliverable, the court will randomly send another summons to another resident in the same zip code. The court will also update its jury mailing list twice a year, instead of once, to cut down on the number of summonses that go to people who have moved.

But, defense lawyer Randolph Gioia said that even more changes are necessary to deal with the significant number of federal jury summonses, particularly in communities with large minority populations, that are not responded to by the addressee and are not returned as undeliverable.

"The person on trial is entitled to a fair trial by a cross-section of the community, so whatever way they can accomplish that, that's what should be done," Gioia said.

Yesterday, Chief US District Judge Mark L. Wolf said the revised jury plan that went into effect this month is expected to increase the number of African-Americans on juries in the state's federal courts in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield.

"We're going to be as good as a federal court can humanly be in summonsing in a cross-section" of people for jury duty," Wolf said.

The revisions followed a study ordered by US District Judge Nancy Gertner in 2005 , which found that wealthier towns with fewer members of minority groups do a better job of keeping accurate residency lists than more diverse cities, including Boston. As a result, she found that a higher percentage of jury summonses sent to minorities come back as undeliverable or go unanswered.

Between 2001 and 2003, 15.2 percent of the summonses sent to Boston were returned as undeliverable, and 23 percent got no response. While 7 percent of the jury pool for the federal court in Boston is African-American, the number drops to 3 percent after summonses are returned because of the high unreturned summonses, according to court officials.

Gertner crafted a new plan that targeted the same zip codes with additional jury summonses when the initial summonses came back as undeliverable or unanswered. But a federal appeals court ruled that she had overstepped her authority and that any new jury plan must be adopted by all of the judges in the district.

US District Judge Reginald C. Lindsay, who led a panel of judges that conducted a yearlong study before coming up with the revisions, said the new plan deals with the problem of how to handle the undeliverable summonses.

But he said that trying to deal with jury summonses that go unanswered is "a difficult problem to address" and the court doesn't have the resources to follow up on all of them. He said residents may have received the summonses, but ignored them for a variety of reasons, such as they are not legal citizens, don't speak English, or just don't want to travel to the federal courthouse.

Still, Lindsay said the court will study the impact of the new plan and try to come up with more improvements, if necessary. "We're not done," he said.