Expanding the Pool: What’s the Best Way to Get a Jury of Your Peers?

            It’s a commonly known tenet of the Constitution: a person has the right to trial by jury and that jury is to be made up of their peers. Constitutional claim after Constitutional claim, and Supreme Court case after Supreme Court case have tried to drill to the bottom of what that means. At the end of the day, most processes for picking potential jury members attempt to get a rough but representative cross section of the people living in an area. However, no system would be perfect. No system would accurately provide a jury of one’s peers in every situation. But strides can be made in how those juries are gathered, and steps can be taken to make sure that that cross section is as representative as possible.

            It’s a challenge that many jurisdictions just leave as is. But California may be trying something new to make sure that a jury of peers is actually a jury of peers. A lot of places tie in the pool of potential jurors to something like drivers licenses or voter registration. While this does provide a steady pool of potential jurors, a new California bill proposes to use a different potential pool: anyone who filed a state tax return. Proponents of the bill say that it expands the amount of people who can be selected to serve on juries, and with that it would be able to get a more diverse panel. 

            That’s the point of juries in the first place: to get a cross section of everyday people who can sit on a jury to be someone’s peers. It’s what was intended by the amendments as they were written, and it is something echoed in all of those constitutional challenges and Supreme Court cases. Expanding the potential jury pool would do exactly that. By expanding that pool to anyone who files state taxes, California is more likely to get a larger cross section of people, ones that aren’t necessarily covered by drivers license and voter registration lists. Proponents of the bill point out that basing the jury pools on voter registration or drivers licenses would skew away from minorities and the impoverished. They also point out that even though whites make up only 42% of California’s population, they make up almost 60% of its registered voters. On top of that, over 18 million people in California filed state tax forms, which would absolutely serve as an expansion of the jurors that could potentially be called. 

            Expanding the jury pool always seems like it would be a good thing. Representative government not only means representative legislatures, but a representative judicial system. If you are trying to get to a more representative jury, and therefore a more representative judicial system, making sure that that jury is actually representative of the population of the area should be paramount. Should this bill pass, California will have taken a big step to make sure that there is an actual representative cross section filling jury boxes in their courthouses. One would hope that other states would follow suit.