Jury crisis threatening Suffolk trials

Suffolk County, facing a years-long surge in violent crime and a spike in trials, will run out of prospective jurors by October, potentially throwing the legal system in Boston and some surrounding communities into disarray, state officials warned last week.

Without jurors, the court system will be unable to hold trials, said Pamela J. Wood, the state's jury commissioner. And without trials, judges will be pressured to grant bail to defendants charged with murder, rape, and other violent crimes, she said.

"This is a public safety crisis," Wood said in an interview in her office. She and other officials said the predicament is unprecedented in Massachusetts.

On the civil side, courts will be forced to delay medical malpractice suits in the county, which sees more such cases than any other in Massachusetts.

"Nothing could be clearer than we need more jurors in Suffolk County," Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy said.

The impending crisis is the result of Boston's high murder rate, the city's changing demographics, and the use of more investigative grand juries to help combat a rise in gang and gun violence. All of this, officials said, is exacerbated by a high rate of residents who fail to report for jury duty.

Last year, only a quarter of those summoned showed up for jury duty in Suffolk County, a rate far below other counties. Wood blamed the high number of students in Boston, who often skip jury duty, although they could face fines up to $2,000 and criminal charges. She also cited the influx of residents who are not US citizens or do not speak English, who are exempt from service.

Most states summon jurors every one or two years. But when jurors report for duty in Massachusetts, the law exempts them from serving for the next three calendar years. It also requires them to be notified of their jury date three months in advance. The law means jurors serving in January 2007 must be notified in October 2006, for example, and are not be eligible to serve again until April 2010 because they could not be summoned in calendar year 2009.

Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said his efforts to take gang members off the streets through the city's gun court and his investigative grand juries would come to a halt if the county runs out of jurors.

"We've come too far in Suffolk County, drawing down that backlog of cases, swiftly moving gun cases through the system, keeping a homicide session going for three years running," Conley said. "We've come too far to lose all those gains to a shrinking jury pool."

The crunch has already forced busier courts to compete for jurors and frustrated officials who say they could handle more cases if they had additional jurors.

"I've got one court that's just been begging me for more jurors for months now," said Wood. "We're impeding their ability to do justice."

In 2005, the Office of the Jury Commissioner summoned 97 percent of Suffolk County's eligible jurors, but the courts ran out two days before the end of the year. Because the shortage fell during the holidays, only one trial was scheduled and it was postponed a few days.

Last year, the office summoned 99 percent of the pool and just scraped by, Wood said.

This year, for the first time, Wood said, every eligible juror will be called, and it still won't be enough.

"It's a shocker to me," said William J. Leahy, chief of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state public defender agency. "The right to jury trial is so fundamental. It really is the linchpin of our criminal system and also our civil system."

The number of jurors needed in Suffolk County hovered at about 45,000 from 2002 until 2005, when it jumped to 62,000, Wood said. That year, officials started holding jury trials at Brighton Municipal Court and opened a new Boston Municipal Court, which had formerly shared quarters -- and jurors -- with Suffolk Superior Court. Those two needed an additional 200 jurors weekly, Wood said.

This year, Conley has called for nine grand juries to investigate gun crimes and homicides, up from seven in 2006 and six in 2005. Each grand jury needs 23 jurors, but because so few people respond to summonses, Wood said she must send out 800 notices for each panel.

Los Angeles County and New York County have also struggled to provide enough jurors in recent years, but each has averted chaos, said G. Thomas Munsterman, director of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts. New York repealed a rule that exempted doctors, lawyers, and other professionals from jury service, he said. (The rule does not exist in Massachusetts.) Los Angeles postponed some court cases and bused jurors to courthouses with the greatest need.

"It's an uphill battle in the urban courts," Munsterman said. "Be it crime, be it civil litigation, larger panels, lower juror response rates, or poor juror lists, it all comes to bear in the urban courts."

Suffolk County has 550,000 residents over 18, but in any year can summon only about 200,000 because of the three-year restriction.

Wood is pushing a bill she says would soften the crunch by allowing potential jurors to be called more frequently.

State Senator Robert S. Creedon Jr. and Representative Eugene L. O'Flaherty, chairmen of the Judiciary Committee, have filed the bill, which drops the "calendar year" language and allows jurors to be summoned exactly three years after their date of service. The bill, which is scheduled for a hearing Tuesday, would increase the pool of jurors in Suffolk County by about 15,000 to 20,000 a year, Wood said.

"I wouldn't think there would be any reason why it wouldn't just whistle through," Creedon said. "If I were to sit down and list all the pluses and minuses, I couldn't list any minuses."

But Conley called the bill a "Band-Aid on a much larger problem."

He said the Legislature should consider allowing Suffolk to summon residents of other counties for jury duty. He noted that some county gun crimes are already prosecuted in federal court before jurors who live outside Suffolk, and that juries already include students from outside Massachusetts.

Judge Murphy raised concerns that Conley's proposal would result in fewer minorities serving on juries. In Boston, which has a high percentage of minorities, that would violate the constitutional right to a trial by a jury of one's peers, he said.

Wood warned that without action by the Legislature, the shortages would persist for years.

"There's no formal contingency plan," she said. "We're working with the courts to make plans how to handle this situation."

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com. Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.