Posted on 07/30/2002 11:05:45 AM PDT by FourPeas
Many blacks were excluded from Kent County jury pools due to a computer glitch that selected a majority of potential candidates from the suburbs, a new report shows.
For months, Kent County officials denied claims of racial imbalance in the selection of jurors.
Bur officials Monday conceded that their own review of the system found nearly 75 percent of the county's 454,000 eligible residents were excluded from potential jury pools since spring 2001.
"There has been a mistake -- a big mistake," Kent County Chief Circuit Judge George Buth complained Monday.
Troubleshooters two weeks ago discovered the error, which went undetected for 16 months.
City High School teacher Wayne Bentley long complained about the under-representation of minorities on Kent County juries. He joined a protest this summer outside the downtown courthouse.
Bentley buttressed his case with figures he obtained from Kent County through a request under the state's Freedom of Information Act.
While publicly insisting Bentley's calculations must be wrong, county officials called in their computer software maker and a statistician to review the system.
Results of the internal report were startling.
It found that more jury summonses were mailed to outlying areas than to areas within Grand Rapids, Kentwood, Wyoming and Walker -- where most of the county's minorities live. The findings will be presented Thursday at a Kent County Jury Commission meeting.
"The county says it is now corrected, but that doesn't satisfy everybody," Buth said. "We are still trying to get all the facts. Until last week, we were assured by our administration that they were going by the book."
Questions are being raised about what effect the error will have on trials conducted during the past 16 months -- including the conviction of Pietro Terrell for the shooting death of construction millionaire Robert Fryling.
Terrell's attorneys contended their client, a black man, was denied a fair trial before a jury of his peers.
Kent County officials in June launched an investigation into the system after being spurred to action by Bentley's initial report, Kent County Administrator Daryl Delabbio said.
They discovered an error occurred
when county workers took over maintenance from a private contractor of the computer used to randomly select potential jurors from a list provided by the Secretary of State. While the list has 454,000 Kent County names and addresses, the computer mistakenly was told to consider only 118,000.
"It's unfortunate it happened, but the response, I think, was timely," Delabbio said. "With the change that is being made, what we should see happening is the jury pools being more reflective of the populations."
Bentley, who sits on the Jury Commission, said he went public with his complaints about the way jurors are selected "because nobody wanted to do anything."
"They never would have checked it. They never would have agreed with me, and now they are."
Buth applauded Bentley's persistence. "You have to give Bentley a lot of credit for this being discovered and bringing public pressure to bear and causing this review."
Kent County Commissioner Paul Mayhue said the disclosure from county officials is long overdue.
"Right now, justice is not justice," Mayhue said. "If people file appeals based on that, then so be it."
Mayhue, D-Grand Rapids, joined Bentley and members of the Inter-Denominational Ministerial Alliance in pickets in front of the Kent County Courthouse last month.
"Nobody came back and numerically disputed anything Mr. Bentley brought fourth. ... People downtown just weren't listening," Mayhue said.
Mayhue called on Delabbio to discover how the problem happened, and find out if the mistake was intentional.
Delabbio said no individual was held accountable for the error because it was not deliberate. "No one is in trouble. It was an honest mistake," Delabbio said.
W. David Boehm, director of the county's computer technology department, explained that with only one quarter of the names and addresses to choose from, the computer automatically selected a correct proportion of jurors from each of the county's zip codes.
Then, when the computer noticed the need for hundreds more jurors, it started selecting again from the top of the list -- the lowest numbered zip codes that happen to serve the county's outlying areas. Filling out the needed number, the computer usually stopped at zip code 49505 and never again reached zip codes that cover the county's most dense population areas.
The result: more jurors than required were summoned from places such as Rockford and Cannon Township while fewer jurors than expected were summoned from inner-city Grand Rapids. Walker, Kentwood and parts of Wyoming also were under-represented.
"We clearly screwed up in that data entry but didn't know it," Boehm said.
Although the system is repaired and successful tests were run, Boehm said notice of jury duty has to be sent so far in advance that juries likely will continue to be composed of residents selected by the flawed system until mid-August or September.
Defense lawyers who expect to take clients to trial in the coming month are considering their options, including requests for dismissals or postponements that could backlog the court system.
"I've got a couple of trials coming up, so I will be keeping an eye on how this works out," said Peter Walsh, a lawyer who last month filed a challenge of the jury system in Grand Rapids District Court based on Bentley's research.
Walsh's test case, a black motorist whose drunken-driving charge was to have been considered by an all-white jury, got dismissed when it was discovered the arresting Grand Rapids Police officer never received her subpoena to testify.
Lawyers for Terrell, the man convicted of the 1993 Fryling murder, said they will conduct their own study.
"So now they admit they could be leaving out whole portions of the community," said Gordon Berris, one of Terrell's Southfield-based lawyers. "I will want my own independent statistician to review the numbers.
"It's very well possible there are other problems with the system that they are just now realizing, and it's not just Pietro's case. There could be a lot of individuals who had trials in Kent County who also were affected by this."
Grand Rapids District Judge Patrick Bowler, who also serves as president of the Grand Rapids Bar Association, said the lawyers' group will present a resolution at Thursday's meeting, recommending the county take immediate action to fix the problem.
But Bowler does not believe the error will cause a flood of appeals. He warned that claims of an unfair jury are difficult to prove.
"I don't think there is a lot of hope for defense lawyers getting convictions reversed. It boils down to whether there was a fair and impartial jury, capable of finding the facts," Bowler said.
"That will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis through the appellate process. Ultimately, it will be up to them to determine if there was a truly fair jury. If not, it opens a real can of worms."
This statement is true.
Terrell was a pimp, thief, and murderer.
No known pimp, thief or murderer was seated on his trial jury.
So when they DEprivatized, the mistake was made and went undetected.
Did the govt union thugs get asked what they thought of this?
What did Buth know, and when did he know it?
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