Best Practices Committee

July 30, 2009

Board for Judicial Administration
Best Practices Committee

Telephone Conference
July 30, 2009
Meeting Minutes

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Welcome and Call to Order

Judge Spector called the meeting to order.  Introductions of participants were made, and new members Ms. Pat Austin, Judge Steven Buzzard, Ms. Marti Maxwell and Judge Jean Rietschel were welcomed. 

Committee Overview

Judge Spector provided a brief overview of the Committee’s mission and activities.  The mission of the BJA Best Practices Committee (BPC) has evolved from its original charge of evaluating and promoting court best practices.  BPC, under the direction of the BJA, is now charged with creating a court performance audit plan.  BPC’s primary activity is concentrated on developing, testing, and evaluating court performance audit measures.  The BJA approved a series of measures for the BPC to pursue and defined a testing and evaluation process based on the Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS).  Each measure is designed to allow the auditor (AOC staff) to objectively review courts’ activities related to the standards defined in that measure.  The standards must be reasonable for courts at all levels to achieve whether they are large, small, urban, or rural. 

Judge Spector requested that staff send out information on the performance audit plan process, status of the various measures, and timeline (in progress). 

Approval of Minutes

Judge Spector asked if there were any changes to the December 17 and 18 meeting minutes.  There were none.  

A motion was made by Ms. Pettus to approve the minutes, Judge Lucas seconded the motion.  The motion passed unanimously.

Measure 4:  Effective Use of Jurors

Judge Spector moved on to the BPC’s work at hand which is the development of a measure to evaluate courts’ jury management effectiveness.  The first task is to define three or four standards on which the measure should be based.  Participants noted that standards should ideally be based on existing recognized standards defined in statute, court rule, the Washington State Jury Standards, or the Washington State Jury Commission recommendations.  

Jury Term:  After some discussion, participants agreed that the first standard should ensure that the courts are requiring a jury term and length of service within the guidelines defined by statute (RCWs 2.36.010, 2.36.080).

Random Selection:  Participants also decided to include a standard that evaluated the randomness of the courts’ jury selection process.   The discussion centered around how randomness would be determined and evaluated (for example, would the algorithm that randomly selects jurors to be summoned be evaluated, would the list of jurors summoned be checked, or should jury selection process documentation be provided to the auditor?).  It was noted that groundwork has been laid by G. Thomas Munsterman’s authoritative work:  Jury System Management. Munsterman asserts that the result of the selection process is the best indicator of whether or not randomness has been achieved. 

Juror Yield:  The participants also discussed the possibility of creating a juror yield standard.  Discussion revolved around the challenges of evaluating a court’s performance in this area.  Issues were raised such as:

• Jurors being called and panels being provided by superior courts to district and possibly to municipal courts in their jurisdictions (how would we evaluate the district and municipal courts for functions under the control of the superior court?).
• Widely varying capabilities and sophistication of electronic jury management systems.
• The kind of juror information currently collected by courts (race and ethnicity is not collected).
• The kind of statistics generated/evaluated.
• Whether exit questionnaires are routinely administered.
• The fact that the county clerk manages juror summoning in many jurisdictions (the county clerks’ offices are not being audited—executive branch).
• The challenge of consistently defining how juror yield should be calculated and determining the yield that a court must attain to meet the standard.  (The accepted definition of yield is laid out on page 45 of Munsterman’s Jury System Management and used to calculate yield in the NCSC CourTools jury measure referenced below.)  
• The difficulty of obtaining reliable juror yield data from the courts (as demonstrated in the recent Juror Pay Study conducted by the Washington State Center for Court Research (WSCCR) in three jurisdictions where data availability and quality varied widely, even though they all used the same electronic jury management system). 

Juror Usage was suggested as a possibly more useful measure than juror yield.  Usage measures the number voir dired, and the number actually impaneled, as a proportion of the overall group of jurors who report for service.

Next Meeting

The Committee will meet at the AOC SeaTac facility to continue discussing and defining the standards to be used in the Jury Effectiveness measure.  The meeting is tentatively arranged for October 1. 

The meeting adjourned.