Lack of jurors

Editor's note: In June, Universal Hub readers selected selected five questions for Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley. Here is his answer to one of them:

Jury duty is the civic responsibility most broadly shirked. This is why we are running out of jurors. Would it be possible to link this civic responsibility with other civic rights in order to improve compliance? For example, if you can't get somebody who supposedly lives at a certain address to respond to a summons to jury duty, should that person be allowed to retain their resident parking sticker?

Jury duty is both a privilege for those of us who are blessed to live in a free society and one of the few obligations of our American citizenship - citizenship which bestows so many blessings. More than that, it's a fascinating experience with drama that no movie or television show can match.

Judges have the power to issue arrest warrants against those who fail to show up for jury duty, and this is certainly one solution, but I think we can all understand why they might be reluctant to use this big stick. Your idea might actually be an even bigger stick! I think a lot of people would much rather spend a few days weighing the evidence in a criminal or civil trial than lose their parking space in certain neighborhoods.

A few months back, I proposed what I thought was another fair and effective approach that would gently remind citizens of their obligation to jury duty while navigating a middle ground between ordering arrests and tolerating a serious problem. I proposed notifying the Registry of Motor vehicles about jury delinquencies so that offenders would have their licenses suspended or could not renew them until they fulfilled their obligations. It's good to see that we're looking at the problem in similar ways.

It's also important to remember, though, that the documented shortage of jurors has as much to do with Suffolk County's changing demographics as with any individual's willful failure to appear. Boston in particular is home to a very large population of transient and ineligible residents. These include students and others who change addresses frequently, non-citizens who are exempt from jury duty, and those for whom English is not a fluent language. I have no doubt that many of these folks would like to take part in the process but either don't receive the summonses or can't understand them. Sooner or later, we're going to have to take a good, hard look at how we select jurors in Massachusetts and whether the arbitrary and outdated county lines are realistic boundaries for the jury pool.

Next: What an individual can do about crime.