The daily pay rate for Alameda County jurors is rising from barely the cost of a sandwich and chips to $100 a day — a significant jump in the expensive Bay Area.
The sixfold increase in jurors’ daily allowance, which begins Tuesday, comes courtesy of a pilot program among seven counties that aims to finally boost jurors’ pay beyond a few cups of coffee each day. The goal, court officials say, is to stem the tide of people who claim financial hardship and beg out of their jury service every day.
The change drew praise from Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods, who lauded the new pay rate as a chance for lower-income residents to finally serve on juries with greater regularity.
“Far too often when our Black clients go to trial, there is not a single person on the jury who looks like them,” Woods said in a statement. “That’s not justice. Paying more means more Black and Brown people serving on juries, and that’s going to mean fairer trials for our clients and communities.“
For decades, the daily allowance for jurors in Alameda County matched that of almost every other county in the state — a mere $15 a day.
At that rate, jurors could barely buy a basic lunch at most of the delis surrounding the courthouse.
That’s an important measure: Jurors do not receive money for meals while serving. They also only get $1 off the $7-a-day cost to park in the county parking garage closest to the Rene C. Davidson courthouse in downtown Oakland, where many of the county’s most serious — and longest-running — trials are held.
The new pilot program was created through legislation passed by state lawmakers in 2022, known as Assembly Bill 1981. Through it, the Judicial Council of California hired a consultant to study whether higher compensation rates could boost juror participation and broaden the diversity of juror panels.
That consultant, the National Center for State Courts, recently started surveying jurors in Alameda County and will continue to do so in the months ahead to determine whether the pilot program is working. The other counties involved in the pilot include El Dorado, Fresno, Imperial, Monterey, San Bernardino and Shasta counties.
The new pay rates aren’t permanent. The $100-a-day paychecks will only be available for two years or until funding for the $27-million program is gone.
Little data exists in the East Bay on how often the state’s current reimbursem*nt rate factors into people seeking financial hardship exemptions.
Several interns for the Alameda County Superior Court sat in on numerous jury selections in May and June of this year and found that roughly a third of the jurors were excused for hardships, such as financial concerns or pre-scheduled vacations, county court spokesman Paul Rosynsky said. The list of cases that the interns observed was not all-encompassing, meaning that the exemption rate could actually be far higher or lower.
Yet even getting people to show up for jury duty can be a struggle, Rosynsky said.
Only 34% of people responded to their jury summons from July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2022, according to the county’s former jury case management vendor. That represents the most recent data reported to the court on juror appearance rates, Rosynsky said.
Despite low juror-participation rates, Alameda County court officials haven’t typically struggled to fill juries here, Rosynsky said. But the composition of those juries often came down to who could take time off work or who could convince their employer to keep paying them while they served — or those for whom working is not a concern at all.
“You get a lot of retirees — it’s people who can afford to be on a jury,” Rosynsky said. “So I think the hope here is that we can get some folks who wouldn’t otherwise afford to be on a jury actually can be on it.”
There’s evidence to suggest such pay raises work elsewhere in the Bay Area. An effort in San Francisco that began in 2022 also raised the daily reimbursem*nt to $100 a day — albeit only for people earning less than 80% of the city’s median income.
A year into the program, a survey of almost all of the 495 San Franciscans who received the extra money found that it helped diversify jury panels. In all, 84% of the survey’s respondents said the increased pay allowed them to serve as jurors — a key fact, given the median annual household income for those recipients was $38,000. Sixty-percent of the respondents were people of color, the survey found.
Just this week, San Francisco officials announced that the program received a fresh infusion of $650,000 in state funding to keep it running into the middle of next year. Some San Francisco County officials have since expressed a desire for the funding to continue far into the future.
The program “has empowered hundreds of low-income San Franciscans to do their civic duty, allowing individuals to administer justice for the diverse communities they represent, making the criminal justice system fairer,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a statement.
Alameda County’s program comes with additional perks. Along with the daily pay raise, jurors can expect to see an increase in their mileage reimbursem*nt for travel to and from the courthouse. That rate increases Tuesday to 67 cents a mile, nearly double the previous rate of 34 cents a mile.
Anyone using public transportation on the way to jury service can receive an additional $12 a day on top of their daily reimbursem*nt total, the superior court announced this week.
The reimbursem*nts begin the second day of a juror’s service, regardless of whether that person has been selected for a jury. The length of the jury selection process can vary widely, with more complex or high-profile cases taking weeks or longer.
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