"A Comparative Study of Juror Utilization in U.S. District Courts"

Of Note

Marika Litras and John R. Golmant, "A Comparative Study of Juror Utilization in U.S. District Courts," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 3 (March 2006): 99-120.

Given the concern about underutilized jurors-who may be unhappy about the system if they have "sat around" to no apparent

purpose-it is important to have some research conducted on factors affecting juror utilization. The study by Litras and Golmant examines juror use across federal judicial districts for 1992 to 2002 to determine what factors affect the proportion of available jurors who were neither selected, serving, nor challenged (NSSC). They find that the resulting proportion "was largely a function of high juror supply, low juror demand, and constraints on judicial resources" (p. 113), the last of which was measured in months in which judgeships were vacant. Not significantly affecting the proportion of NSSC jurors were "[t]he number of visiting judges, court size, and . . . caseload complexity" (p. 113). Of the factors with a positive effect, the most important was the number of available jurors: an increase in the number of jurors available led to an increase in NSSC jurors. Among other factors was the "diet" of civil and criminal trials in a district, as the more criminal trials there were, particularly on a regular basis, the greater the juror utilization; however, if criminal trials were longer, the utilization of jurors decreased (pp. 114-15).