PSU Magazine Winter 1994

defined. In the U.S. Supreme Court's review of jury selection cases, the issue of fair representation has focused on race and gender. In Multnomah County, jury pools are derived from a master list supplied annually by the State Court Adminis– trator, who creates the list by merging voter registration and Department of Motor Vehicles lists. The term of duty is ten day . Members of the jury pool receive a mere $10 per day (a figure unchanged since 1971) and, though emp loyers can't fire emp loyee who take time off for jury duty, neither do they have to pay those workers during their absence. In the first ten month of 1992, 42,000 people were subpoenaed, and only about 5,500 actually appeared. Although the state con titution establishes a contempt penalty for non– respondents, the penalty is very rarely applied. And the provision for excu ing jurors is so broad that Multnomah · County Court Administrator Doug Bray says he has to excuse anyone who "says the right words." ORS 10.050 allows exemption if jury duty would create "undue hardship or extreme inconvenience to the person, the person's family, the person's employer, or the public served by the person." That cuts a pretty big swath through the potential jury pool. 6 PSU Magazine Reyburn remembers erv ing with a juror in her fifties, who was definitely making a personal sacrifice. "She wa a pizza deliverer, minimum wage," Reyburn recalls. "She really needed her job, and she was panicky. She would call every day to ee whether she was going to work that night." Subjects of the PSU study were divided into three groups: former jurors, people excused from jury duty, and those who ignored the subpoena altogether. The self-administered questionnaire asked a wide variety of questions ranging from typical demographic information to attitudes about the justice system and the experience of jury duty. Survey results showed that Multnomah County jury pools are actually fairly representative of the community.There were some statistically significant discrepancies between the citizen that were subpoenaed and those that actually served. Hi panics are under represented as are people under the age of 35, but, according to Haggerty, "The differ– ences were too small to be found con titutionally problematic." This was a big relief to the MBA, according to Geil. "If the figure had come out differently, that would have raised questions about all the jury verdicts in the la t ten years," he says. "It wou ld ·