NCSC provides tool to improve jury operations

NCSC provides courts with new tool to improve jury operations

Williamsburg, Va. (June 22, 2010) — The National Center for State Courts’ (NCSC) Center for Jury Studies recently released a new tool to help our nation’s trial courts evaluate and improve jury operations. The Jury Managers’ Toolbox™ (JMT) is an online diagnostic tool designed to identify areas of strength and weakness in jury operations, suggest targeted strategies to improve performance, and estimate the fiscal and operational impact of those improvement efforts. With courts seeking greater operating efficiency in order to maintain essential judicial services to citizens, JMT can help provide solutions in the area of jury management. Use of the software is free to state court personnel at www.jurytoolbox.org.
 
While jury trials are a rare event in most contemporary courthouses, when they take place they tend to use a disproportionate share of court resources. Moreover, maintaining a pool of prospective jurors who can be summonsed to serve within a relatively short period of time is more costly and labor-intensive than most courts realize. Developed in cooperation with the state judicial systems of Arizona, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, and Pennsylvania and with a grant from the State Justice Institute, JMT employs the “science” of jury system management, including a number of useful performance measures that help court administrators assess jury system efficiency. It was developed to provide court managers a summary of the analyses with brief explanations of key findings and recommendations, and it underwent rigorous beta testing by trial court administrators from the states that participated in its development.

The JMT focuses primarily on jury yield and juror utilization, the two key performance measures for jury operations. The calculations for these measures are based on one of the NCSC CourTools measures and uses findings from NCSC’s “The State-of-the-States Survey of Jury Improvement Efforts: A Compendium Report” for baseline comparison statistics. The software also incorporates population, demographic, and socioeconomic statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau to provide detailed analyses that take local community characteristics into consideration.  Supplemental tools address the most common areas of poor performance in jury operations, especially undeliverable summonses; non-response and failure-to-appear rates; under-inclusive and non-representative master jury lists; and overly lenient or inconsistent excusal rates.