Technology | 33
Do college students really receive jury duty more often than others? BY HANNAH BERNSTEIN, JOURNALISM & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 2021
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hen looking in any dorm building mail room, it’s hard not to notice what seems like a million jury duty summons postcards in everyone’s boxes. Living in Boston with the highest colleges per capita in the United States, it makes sense that there’s just more college students on the list. But do college students really receive jury duty more often, and why? “[A jury office’s] ultimate goal should be that whoever’s on trial has a jury of their peers, that everybody has an equal chance to face jurors that look like the population,” said Robert Boatright, a professor at Clark University who has done previous research on jury selection and enforcement. But he says it’s unlikely more college students are actually getting jury duty. “It seems to me like I get summonses more frequently here in Massachusetts than I did when I lived in other places,” he said. “On the other hand, the thing to consider is that Massachusetts is extremely generous about letting you defer your jury service … so that’s an effort to try to address the needs of college students or people whose jobs won’t allow them to take off that particular day.” Beyond the anecdotal evidence, let’s take a look at the individual chances of serving on a jury using data from a FiveThirtyEight study in 2015. In a given year, according to an estimate by the National Center for State Courts, 32 million people are summoned and eight million of those actually report. The 24 million difference is a result of undeliverable postcards, failures to appear, and more. There isn’t more recent data, so there’s not even a good way to estimate a normal eligible person’s chances of serving, let alone college students. There’s also another perspective on this. Most jury selection systems use a basic list randomizer to select who gets summoned and when. Actual randomizers aren’t really what humans perceive as random—for example, Spotify playlists use an algorithm, rather than a randomizer, so the same song or artist doesn’t come up twice in a row. A simpler example comes from basic chance theory: Each time a coin is flipped, there is the exact same chance it will be heads or tails, each time. Each flip doesn’t impact the previous flip, so it’s entirely
PHOTO BY UNSPLASH
possible to get the same result twice (or more) in a row. Obviously, juror lists are a lot longer, but the same basic idea applies. In July 2018, The Curiosity Desk at WGBH looked into a similar question: How does Massachusetts decide who gets summoned for jury duty? They interviewed the state’s jury commissioner, Pamela J. Wood. Here’s what she said about their algorithm: “It is done randomly by computer. We’re not over here drawing names out of a hat.” Wood said the office uses software called Jury+ which uses a “master juror list” to randomly select names. That list is developed from a mandatory municipal census, which Massachusetts requires cities and towns to submit. Because it’s a town census and not a driver’s license list, for example, college students with local dorm addresses get pulled in as well. That’s also unusual because many states don’t allow out-of-state college students to serve. Wood referenced the same coin example: “If you flipped a coin three or four times in a row and got heads every time, you might think it’s unusual, but you’d understand it was random and it wasn’t worth calling the Guinness Book of World Records.” She cited a 10 percent chance of receiving a summons each year, no matter when you last received one. If you serve on a jury, you’re exempt for three years before your name goes back in the hat. So, do college students receive jury duty more often in Boston? Right now, it seems like the answer is no. Instead, because Massachusetts is ahead of other states in many ways when it comes to jury duty summonses, college students make it on the list here when they might not have in other states. But, Boatright had one last thing for college students facing a jury summons to consider: “It’s a good thing to do jury duty,” he said. “It’s annoying to get summonses, but people generally report that it was a worthwhile experience. If you were on trial, you wouldn’t want to show up and have a room full of retired people sitting and judging. You’d want the jury to look like the population.” DESIGN BY LILLIE HOFFART, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 2022
