In Brief:
- A 2023 report found some courts compensate jurors as little as $4 a day for missing work to serve, and some only pay starting on the second day of service.
- When compensation is low, jury duty can result in painful lost income and prompt more low-income people to seek exemption from serving, making juries less diverse. Some states are rethinking how much they reimburse jurors.
- Courts also work to fine-tune exactly how many jurors they call in, using algorithms to calculate the likelihood that enough jurors will show, and adopting new processes to reduce time spent waiting in the courtroom.
Trial by jury is meant to be an important safeguard in ensuring justice and keeping courts responsive to the people they serve. But today, jury duty is often seen as a pain — whether an annoying inconvenience or genuine hardship.
One major challenge is that jurors are often forced to miss work. Their employers might not compensate them, and most courts pay only nominal fees that do not go far toward replacing lost wages.
As courts continue looking for ways to improve the juror experience, some have been working to improve compensation and minimize the time jurors spend waiting, in the hopes of making it easier to serve, thereby improving the diversity of juries and changing public attitudes about jury service.
Many people are wary of jury duty, says Pamela Wood, jury commissioner of the Massachusetts Court System.
Deciding How Many to Call
When courts can better determine how many jurors they’ll need — and avoid calling too many — it’s a win for everyone. It spares residents from taking time away from their lives to come in. It also helps the courts avoid burning through their list of potential jurors unnecessarily. That’s because in some systems, people who turn up for their jury duty dates are exempted from serving again within a certain time period, regardless of whether they wound up impaneled.
Getting the number right can be tricky, however. Courts need to call in a few more jurors than they expect to actually use, in case something unexpected happens. But if they overdo it, many prospective jurors will be left waiting around.
To see how well they’re doing, courts can look to their “juror utilization rate,” which is the percentage of the total pool of “qualified and available jurors” who are used at least once in a trial or who are questioned by attorneys and the judge for their suitability to serve in a trial (a process known as "voir dire").
A juror might go unused if the judges and attorneys have already impaneled all the jurors they need for the day’s trials, if the trial gets canceled or postponed, or if case participants decide to do a plea deal or settlement instead of going to trial.
The National Center for State Courts recommends in a 2023 report that courts aim to have a 72 percent juror utilization rate. At that time, however, state courts were falling “woefully short,” and averaging just a 25 percent juror utilization rate. The situation was especially bad in larger jurisdictions, with courts that serve 500,000 or more people averaging only a 16 percent juror utilization rate, while courts serving fewer than 25,000 people averaged a 31 percent rate.
Some courts look to historic data to help them estimate how many jurors to summon. The Massachusetts Court System, for one, uses algorithms to assess how many jurors to call in and how many of the people who said “yes” to the summons are actually likely to show up (as well as how many of the people who deferred or didn’t reply might show up too). That then lets the court system see if there are any superfluous jurors who can have their service canceled.
“Each of our 65 courts we analyze separately using computer algorithms,” explains Wood. The algorithms consider how each courthouse’s unique characteristics might influence jurors’ likelihood of appearing. That means considering the availability of parking or public transportation and the reputation of the surrounding neighborhood.
But the court is still working to get a handle on the ways that COVID-19 changed things, and introduced new factors that can influence who shows up. For example, people who are immunocompromised may be more wary of coming into a courthouse to serve, while people who think pandemic concerns were overblown may try harder to show up, to make a point about unnecessary caution.
“Everything we do in terms of figuring out how many summonses to send out — and how to hit the target and not bring in too many, but be sure to supply enough, etc., etc., — is based on historical data of how certain types of people behave in certain courts, and there is no historical data on how people behave during and after a pandemic.” Wood says.
Minimizing Time in Court
The Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County has also been fine-tuning its approach to jury management, to reduce the time jurors spend waiting at the courthouse. That can make jury service a far less burdensome experience.
Last year, the court began piloting “remote case-specific questionnaires,” explains Deputy Jury Commissioner Tiana Burdick. The court emails or texts jurors a digital questionnaire they can answer at home. Afterward, judges and attorneys review the responses to determine who to strike. This lets the court alert struck jurors that they won’t be needed before they even leave their homes — while the jurors who aren’t struck only have to show up when they’re needed for a particular case. That might mean coming in at 10:30 a.m. or 1:30 p.m., rather than the usual 7:45 a.m. or 8:30 a.m. When remote questionnaires aren’t used, jurors need to show up early to complete an on-site questionnaire, then wait as judges and attorneys decide which jurors to strike and which to keep for afternoon trials. That could mean jurors waiting around until noon to find out if they’ll serve.
“In calendar year 2024, over 3,000 jurors never had to even come downtown. They were struck in advance, but yet they still got to participate,” Burdick says. “They never had to take a day off of work; they never had to make the drive downtown, but yet still participated.”
The Conference of State Court Administrators has endorsed such practices, recommending in a 2023 report that courts let jurors complete online questionnaires in advance, to allow for disqualifying or excusing jurors without first requiring them to come in to the courthouse.
Raising the Pay
Poor compensation for jury service is a financial hardship for people with low income or whose employers don’t pay them for days they attend jury duty. Not all states require employers to provide paid time off for jury service, and in those that do, the obligation is typically reserved for full-time employees at large companies, per the Conference of State Court Administrators. People paid hourly wages, working for a small company, self-employed or working part time at one or more jobs may suffer lost income from serving on a jury.
Court-provided compensation for jury duty often doesn’t keep up with minimum wage. A 2023 report found some courts paying as little as $4 per day for each day of service. Some courts, like the Alaska court system, paid nothing for the first day of jury service, only providing compensation starting on the second day. Lost income can be significant; in Washington state at the time, there was a $237 gap between the daily per capita income in the state and the maximum daily juror compensation.
Some courts excuse people for whom serving is a financial hardship, but this can mean cases are stuck with juries that have less diversity of life experiences.
San Francisco is one jurisdiction that increased pay for jurors with low or moderate incomes.
“Higher jury pay does, in fact, diversify juries. When juries are more reflective of the communities they serve, they spend more time in deliberations and are less likely to presume guilt,” said Assemblymember Phil Ting in a press release statement announcing continuation of the compensation program.
In the past several years jurisdictions across the country have been upping compensation, realizing that low pay “is a barrier to diversity and representativeness,” says Wood.
A current bill in Massachusetts could help, by raising the rate of jurors compensation to $100 per day, up from $50/day — a rate that was a “princely sum” back when it was set in 1979 but which doesn’t keep up today, Wood says.
New Mexico takes the unusual approach of tying juror compensation to the minimum wage and paying by the hour, at $12/hour. In September 2022, Arizona became the first state to link the level of per diem compensation to the actual amount of income jurors lost by serving. Jurors impaneled on superior court cases now can apply online for reimbursement of up to $300 per day of lost income. And Burdick’s court in Maricopa County also now offers bus passes so people who cannot or do not drive can get to the courthouse.
Who’s on the Jury Lists?
Along with increasing compensation, getting a representative list of potential jurors can improve diversity. Court systems randomly select names from this list to determine who to send out summons letters to. Many courts create their list of names from records like voter registration and drivers' licenses lists. But relying on records related to optional activities can limit what slice of the population juries are drawn from — for example, only those who’ve chosen to vote or who have the money and need to acquire a car.
Massachusetts courts have the good fortune of a more expansive list, Wood says. Cities and towns throughout the state must conduct censuses every year, with the information used by many different government agencies, including the courts.
