Fair Cross-sections and Good Intentions: Representation in Federal Juries

The Jury Selection and Service Act guarantees federal litigants the right to a trial by a jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. For this right to be preserved, the jury wheel from which panels of prospective jurors are summoned must itself adequately reflect the composition of the community. Records of registered or actual voters are the primary source used by federal courts to create their jury wheels. Some courts have concluded that using voter records alone is not sufficient. Prompted by concern that their jury wheels have drifted too far from the standard envisioned by the Jury Act, several federal courts have chosen to use lists of licensed drivers as a supplemental source of names for their jury wheels. To collect data on the results of using this approach, the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois approved a test in which experimental jury wheels were based on a random sample of licensed drivers. The court’s experiment found that using this source would be likely to yield a jury wheel that was less representative of African-Americans than jury wheels that are based entirely on lists of licensed drivers.