Jury verdicts in question [Washington]
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004108742_jurypools05m.html
When an obscure local rule was changed in September, it suddenly made life a whole lot easier for people called to jury duty in King County.
Instead of pulling potential jurors from all corners of the county for criminal trials at two Superior Court courthouses, the county began assigning jurors to cases based on geography: Those who lived south of Interstate 90 were assigned to cases at the Kent courthouse, and those north of I-90 were assigned to downtown Seattle.
The move reduced commute times and traffic hassles, and made jury duty — which requires citizens to report as often as every two years and pays them about $10 a day — a bit more palatable.
But a ruling Thursday by a King County Superior Court judge calls the jury-pool division unconstitutional, saying the potential for a socio-economic imbalance among juries threatens fairness.
The strongly worded decision potentially calls into question hundreds of criminal verdicts rendered since Sept. 1. In it, Judge Cheryl Carey cites case law dating back to the 1800s when a jury that wasn’t drawn from the entire county sentenced a slave to hang. Her ruling has judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and court administrators scrambling to figure out what to do.
