In an unprecedented move for a criminal case in Santa Barbara County, court officials will begin sending out letters next week to as many as 4,000 people in the North County asking them to serve on a jury in the molestation case against Michael Jackson.

There has never been a case in the county that has required such a large pool of potential jurors, said Darrel Parker, the assistant executive officer for the county courthouse in Santa Maria.

“Not that I know of, at least,” he added. “There just hasn’t been a case with this much media attention involving someone with this kind of international recognition.”

The jury summons letters will also be the first test of a new “one-step” jury selection process. The most striking difference of the new system is that people will have less latitude in not responding or excluding themselves from serving on the jury. That means that hundreds of people will have to show up at the courthouse and go through questioning by the judge, Mr. Parker said. To accommodate the sheer number of people summoned, the court will schedule arrivals in shifts over a three-day period, he said.

Along with the logistics of handling hundreds of potential jurors coming in and out of the building, Mr. Parker said the court has to ensure that they are “kept safe,” meaning protected from potential harassment by members of the media.

“I don’t expect problems from the local media, but there are other publications with less regard for our system,” he said.

The large number of jury summonses is perhaps half the number sent out in the recent double-murder case against Modesto fertilizer salesman Scott Peterson.

But in that highly publicized capital murder case, lawyers on both sides had more opportunities to challenge potential jurors, knocking out someone they didn’t want to serve, and requiring a larger pool of potential jurors. In addition, people who opposed the death penalty were automatically excluded. Mr. Peterson was eventually sentenced to death for murdering his wife and unborn son.

In the Jackson case, each side will have perhaps 10 pre-emptory challenges, Mr. Parker said.

The new jury selection system — common across California — replaces a system that was challenged by defense lawyer Robert Sanger last year on constitutional grounds. Mr. Sanger, who is one of Mr. Jackson’s lawyers, made the challenge on behalf of murder client Benjamin Ballesteros, arguing that the old system resulted in juries that consistently lacked representation by Latinos.

Although an appellate court said the old system was not unconstitutionally biased, Santa Barbara Jury Commissioner Gary Blair began transforming the jury selection process last year anyway.

In the past, the two-step process resulted in people who did not respond to the initial jury questionnaire being dropped from the lists of potential jurors. Now names are not culled from the lists so easily and there is a more concerted effort to update mailing lists from current Department of Motor Vehicle records and voter registration rolls, said David Nye, an attorney who represented Mr. Blair in the court case.

The new system, and new laws that result in penalties for people who refuse to serve on juries, could help get more people to participate. But whether it will result in more Latinos participating remains to be seen, Mr. Nye said.

In this case, it is likely that the sheer commitment — attorneys in the case estimate the Jackson case could take up to five months — will likely eliminate many people from serving.

Because of the publicity around the case and Mr. Jackson’s fame, Santa Barbara criminal defense attorney Steve Balash said Mr. Jackson may be entitled to a change of venue.

North County juries also tend to be more conservative, said Mr. Balash.

And with the time commitment, some of the very people Mr. Jackson’s team would like to have on the jury might find themselves unable to serve.

“It’s an extremely huge commitment of time,” Mr. Balash said. “Most working people would have to claim a hardship unless they worked for the county, and I don’t know if a criminal defendant would want a county employee on their jury who might identify more with the DA’s office.”

While government employees — local, state and federal workers — draw a salary while serving on juries, their counterparts in the private sector often are not paid and draw just $15 a day from the court for serving.

Mr. Balash said race only plays a role in this case in the general sense that minorities might have a different perspective on law enforcement than middle-class whites. They might be more willing to take what the district attorney or sheriff’s detectives say with a grain of salt, he said.

Source: News Press

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