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But a law student working for the defense team in Cannon’s death penalty trial noticed something else: In a city with one of the South’s largest public universities, not one member of last month’s jury pool in East Baton Rouge Parish seemed all that young.
On Wednesday, court officials explained why: A “computer glitch” prevented the parish’s jury database from updating properly. Since 2011, more than 150,000 people — including thousands born after June 2, 1993 — have been inadvertently left off the jury rolls, potentially starving young defendants of jurors who were roughly their age.
Across the country, computer-reliant jury coordinators have for years confronted database problems that kept otherwise-eligible potential jurors from being called to the nation’s courthouses. Although they are typically unintentional, such systematic exclusions raise constitutional concerns and threaten the integrity of the jury system, legal experts said.
“It is a vital government function that isn’t that hard to get right, so it’s at least a bit surprising to see errors today that you might think had been eliminated 20 years ago,” said David Rosen, a lawyer who was involved in a jury selection debacle in the early 1990s in Connecticut. “It counts as something that sounds hard to believe until you think a little more about it, and then it becomes all too easy to believe.”
In the Connecticut case, a truncated data field somehow identified all Hartford residents as dead, preventing them from being considered for federal juries. In Kent County, Michigan, hundreds of thousands of people, many of them black, were not sent jury summonses in the early 2000s because a glitch led to only part of a master list being used to pick potential jurors. The Indiana Supreme Court in 2002 overturned a death sentence after “a flawed program” excluded nearly one-third of a county’s jury pool. And in the nation’s capital, a programming error once kept Washingtonians with misdemeanor convictions from jury duty.
“I think they probably happen more frequently than we know about, but it’s only rarely you can look out into the jury assembly room and say, ‘There’s something wrong right now,’” said Paula Hannaford-Agor, director of the Center for Jury Studies, a project of the National Center for State Courts.
About 15 percent of Americans are called for jury duty each year, their ranks drawn from sources like rosters of licensed drivers and registered voters. With millions of names in the mix, a decentralized legal system, and harried judges, clerks and lawyers trying to stem backlogs, researchers and court officials said, jury database errors can happen at plenty of points along the way.
There can be input errors, they said, or miscrafted algorithms. There can be software limitations, wrongly clicked buttons and stale data — all seemingly innocuous snafus that carry constitutional implications in a society where the courts have long grappled with how juries can, and cannot, be constructed. The courts have, for example, set down restrictions on lawyers using race or gender to exclude potential jurors.
Age has been a trickier legal matter, even though some research suggests that jurors’ ages can influence lawyers on both sides of a criminal case. Prosecutors, some researchers say, are more likely to seek older jurors, while defense lawyers often prefer younger ones.
Judge Ramona Emanuel had other worries, chiefly pretrial publicity, when she moved jury selection in Cannon’s case four hours to the southeast of Caddo Parish, where Officer Thomas LaValley was killed in 2015. When Emanuel picked East Baton Rouge Parish, home of the state capital, there was little obvious reason to believe the local jury system was compromised or outdated.
But once potential jurors began reporting to the courthouse overlooking the Mississippi River for Cannon’s trial, his defense team realized that people between the ages of 18 and 25 had not been called for the case or, for that matter, any other in East Baton Rouge Parish in recent years.
“This is not a small or insignificant omission,” said Kerry Cuccia, a defense lawyer. “It is an error of mammoth proportions.”
Court officials repeatedly testified Wednesday that they did not know how thousands of names had been “stripped” from a computer server after routine database updates in 2013, 2015 and 2017. But the error, however it occurred, left the parish working from a roster of potential jurors that had been assembled in 2011.
Ann McCrory, the court’s judicial administrator, said updated names had been “dumped into our system,” but, without explanation, “within a few weeks, they’re gone.”
She and other officials denied any deliberate effort to exclude potential jurors, but they said that an inquiry was underway and that the system would ultimately be righted.
“I know what happened; I don’t know how it happened yet,” Gary Dower, the president of Judicial Systems, the Texas company that helped maintain the East Baton Rouge Parish jury database, said when he testified by telephone Wednesday.
Prosecutors said the errors were not significant enough to warrant stopping the proceedings in Cannon’s trial, which will be held in Shreveport once a jury is picked in Baton Rouge.
“There was absolutely no intent, no plan, no system to exclude,” said Suzanne Williams, a prosecutor, who complained that the defense’s focus on 18- to 25-year-old residents was “arbitrary.”
But Cannon’s lawyers insisted that under state and federal court precedents, a new jury pool should be empaneled — a step that could delay Cannon’s trial for an uncertain period.
“He shouldn’t have to go forward with this jury panel,” another lawyer, Dwight Doskey, told Emanuel on Wednesday afternoon as Cannon’s khaki-clad legs shook beneath the defense table. “This trial should be stopped.”
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, said that in a high-profile, extraordinarily sensitive case like Cannon’s, the backgrounds of jurors were particularly important. Younger jurors, he said, might more closely relate to the defendant and his life experiences.
“This is an age that grew up in an era of Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, and their consciousness about shootings and police and shootings involving the police was filtered through a different experience that may not actually be shared in some ways by others,” said Guthrie, a star of the video that Washington’s Superior Court jurors see after they arrive at Judiciary Square.
In other cases, some people have complained that the machinations over jury selection were, in effect, stall tactics by desperate defense lawyers. In the Indiana case, two members of the state Supreme Court expressed frustration that “a computer glitch” would vacate the views of 24 jurors and two trial judges.
It is not yet clear whether East Baton Rouge Parish’s troubles will lead to new trials for people who have already been convicted. But some legal scholars said that appellate courts could look favorably on arguments that the parish did not fulfill a fundamental duty to ensure a representative jury pool.
“It affects not only our case; it affects other cases, too,” said District Attorney James Stewart Sr. of Caddo Parish, whose office is prosecuting Cannon and who expressed no misgivings about Cannon’s chances for an impartial jury.
Stewart, a former appellate judge in Louisiana, added, “It’s new ground.”
It is not even fully settled how the database error will affect Cannon’s trial, in part because Emanuel has warned that the defense’s complaints about the jury pool were tardy.
She said she would announce a decision Thursday morning, just before she has scheduled jury selection to resume.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.