(Photo by Fred Prouser-Pool/Getty Images)
COVID is going to be with us for a little while longer, but the show must go on and many jurisdictions have moved trials online. While the most entertaining result of this move into uncharted territory is an influx of cat attorneys, it’s also changing the makeup of the juries hearing these cases. And in ways that may have a tangible impact on verdicts.
Sound Jury Consulting looked at the data from King County, Washington, and compared samples of the remote trial jury pool with the in-person jury pool from pre-pandemic times and the results are fascinating.
The most significant difference we noted was in the age category. In-person trials had an average age of 48.5 and median age of 49. With remote trials, the average age drops to 44.8 and the median age drops even further to 41.5. The median age is the more important point of comparison here. As a reminder, the median is the midpoint for all jurors, meaning 50% of the jury pool in remote trials is under 41.5 and 50% is over 41.5. That is a big difference from in-person trials where the median age is 49, but let’s dig a little deeper.
This translates to a jump in millennial participation from 30 to 43 percent. As Sound Jury Consulting’s Thomas O’Toole puts it, this “very well may have stopped the heart of insurers and general counsel reading this post since millennials are often cited as one of the reasons for the recent trend towards nuclear verdicts.” It’s an interesting book-end to a conversation we had with O’Toole back in June about the fact that in-person jury pools during COVID were likely to get more pro-business because the category of people who would show up for an in-person jury and Republicans were close to a perfect circle. We didn’t know what to expect then about juries moving online, but it looks to be the opposite impact.
Turning to the issue of race, we saw other notable differences. In-person jury pools were 81% white, compared to 71% with remote jury pools, which suggests that remote trials could result in greater diversity in our jury pools.
That’s a significant bump in diversity. Seattle is about 65 percent white so the move to remote invites a pool that is much closer to an accurate reflection of the city. It’s the sort of revelation that makes you wonder if remote jury pools might be worth keeping around even after everything returns to normal. The impulse is to run back to the old ways as soon as we receive an all-clear, but if the process of dragging people to a dismal central location to sit around for days only to not be picked has a dramatic impact on the demographics of the pool that’s a big deal. Could remote trials or at least hybrid trials become a fixture for at least some cases? It’s worth thinking about.
At the very least, we could move grand juries online. Having to head to court for a few hours a day over the course of multiple weeks is obnoxious and a drag on people’s workday. Let them log on and listen and then go back to work.
We know we have the technology, we just need the will to use it.
Jury Pool Differences with Remote Jury Trials [Sound Jury Consulting]
Earlier: Juries Are About To Get A Lot More Corporate-Friendly Thanks To COVID
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.