Washington State Jury Commission

Increasing Summons Response

Recommendation 1
A variety of procedures should be developed to address the concerns of those citizens unwilling to participate in jury service. Follow-up procedures should be developed for courts to use where there is no response to a jury summons.

Recommendation 2
Every opportunity should be taken to educate the public on the importance of jury service and to increase diversity on juries by extensive outreach to targeted communities. The implementation committee should coordinate efforts to accomplish this.

Recommendation 3
The format of the addresses in the jury source list databases should be standardized before the databases are combined. The correct county code should be assigned to the licensing data.

Recommendation 4
The combined list should be processed through a National Change of Address program in order to obtain updated address information before mailing.

Recommendation 5
The rules of general application relating to jury source lists should be modified to eliminate license and identicard holder records that have been expired for more than 90 days and to specify that only “active” registered voter records be considered for use in jury source lists.

Recommendation 6
The timing of the jury source list process should be re-examined to enable jurisdictions to perform their annual draw while the list data is still current.

Recommendation 7
All undeliverable and changed address information gathered by the courts should be delivered to the Department of Licensing as well as to county election departments for processing. The Department of Licensing and county auditors should use this information for database corrections. County clerks should be encouraged to create suspense files for chronic non- deliverable addresses.