Getting twelve Wentworth County residents into a jury box used to take an afternoon. Lately, it can take days, or fail altogether, as the county's jury summons response rate has fallen to its lowest level in at least a decade.
Wentworth County court officials say the response rate to jury summonses has fallen to roughly 22 percent this year, down from closer to 40 percent five years ago, a decline that has forced judges to postpone at least four criminal trials since the start of the year because too few prospective jurors appeared to seat a panel.
Court Administrator Diane Merchant said the county mails out roughly 1,200 jury summonses each month to maintain an adequate pool, but that a growing share go unanswered, are returned as undeliverable due to outdated addresses, or result in residents requesting exemptions that judges increasingly find themselves granting to avoid further delay. “We used to be able to count on a healthy cushion,” Merchant said. “That cushion is basically gone.”
Judges say delays ripple through the docket
Wentworth County Superior Court Judge Herbert Solano said he has had to reschedule two trials on his own docket this year after jury pools fell short, pushing both cases back roughly two months and forcing witnesses, including expert witnesses paid by the hour, to clear their calendars twice. “Every one of these delays has a cost that doesn’t show up in a headline,” Solano said. “Witnesses have to take time off work again. Victims have to wait longer for resolution. It adds up.”
District Attorney Vivian Ashcroft said her office has also felt the strain, particularly in cases where victims or witnesses are reluctant to testify and a long delay increases the risk that they become unavailable or unwilling by the time a new trial date arrives. “A jury shortage doesn’t just inconvenience the court,” Cho said. “It can be the difference between a case going forward and a case falling apart.”
People tell me they didn’t get the summons, or they got it and figured someone else would show up. When enough people think that at once, nobody shows up.
Diane Merchant, Wentworth County Court Administrator
Public Defender Nadia Fontaine said the shortage cuts both ways for defendants, some of whom have also seen trial dates pushed back while they remain in custody awaiting resolution of their cases, adding pressure to an already crowded Wentworth County Jail. “A defendant sitting in jail waiting for a jury that doesn’t show up is not an abstract problem,” Fontaine said. “That’s real time added to somebody’s life before they’ve even been convicted of anything.”
County looks at modernizing the process
Merchant said the county is exploring several fixes, including switching from a mailed paper summons to a system that also sends text and email reminders, updating its voter and driver’s license records more frequently to reduce undeliverable mail, and lengthening the amount of notice given to prospective jurors from two weeks to four. She said a pilot text-reminder program in a similar-sized county elsewhere in the state had improved response rates by roughly 8 percentage points.
Judge Solano said he supports the changes but cautioned that no administrative fix will fully solve what he sees as a broader erosion of civic obligation. “Some of this is logistics we can fix,” Solano said. “Some of it is a culture where fewer people feel like jury duty is something they owe their community, and that part is harder to legislate.”
County Council Member Terrence Boudreaux, whose district includes many of the residents Merchant said are hardest to reach by mail due to address turnover, said he would support funding the modernized notification system in the next budget cycle. “If part of the problem is that our records for Lowertown addresses are stale, that’s a fixable data problem, and I don’t want cost to be the reason we don’t fix it,” Boudreaux said.
Merchant said the county expects to bring a formal funding request for the new notification system to the county board within the next two months, with a goal of having it in place before the start of next year’s jury cycle. In the meantime, she said, judges have been granting more one-time continuances rather than dismissing cases outright, a stopgap she acknowledged “just moves the problem a few months down the calendar.”
Cho said her office has also begun asking judges to consider seating slightly smaller alternate-juror pools in lower-stakes cases to reduce the number of prospective jurors needed at once, a practice she said is legal under state rules but one defense attorneys have questioned. Fontaine said she supports efforts to widen the jury pool rather than shrink the alternate count, arguing that fewer alternates increases the risk of a mistrial if even one seated juror has to be excused mid-trial.
Solano said he has also begun holding brief informational sessions for jurors who do appear, walking them through why the process sometimes stalls before testimony begins. “People show up more willing to serve again if they understand why the morning felt disorganized,” he said. “A lot of this is about restoring some trust in a system that, frankly, hasn’t made itself easy to trust lately.”