Another California professional group wants a free pass from jury duty. This lawmaker says no

Modesto Assemblymember Juan Alanis is a former sheriff’s sergeant. Corona Assemblymember Bill Essayli is a former county and federal prosecutor. The two Republicans agree on a lot of things when it comes to crime and courts.

But Essayli let Alanis know last week he staunchly opposes Alanis’s bill that would give county probation officers a permanent pass to get out of jury duty for criminal cases. State probation officers unions are championing Assembly Bill 387, since they think their members should have the same rights as police officers and sheriff’s deputies to avoid jury service. 

But Essayli, who has prosecuted more than 20 criminal trials in his career, said probation officers should be no different than any other Californian.

“If we go down this road, today, it’s probation officers,” he told the Assembly Judiciary Committee last week. “Tomorrow, it’s court clerks, and then it’s going to be prosecutors and public defenders and judges and probably politicians.”

Alanis’s bill nonetheless advanced 11-1 out of its first hearing, with Essayli casting the only “no” vote. The bill advanced Thursday from the Assembly floor to the California Senate without anyone voting against it. However, 13 members didn’t vote on the measure, including Essayli. As CalMatters has reported, not voting counts the same as voting “no.” Legislators regularly dodge voting on controversial measures to avoid angering influential political groups or offending their colleagues.

For years, various professional groups and unions have tried to get the Legislature to give their members a pass from mandatory jury duty. Probation officers hope their latest attempt ends differently than it did in 2018 when then-Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill.

“Jury service is a fundamental obligation of citizenship,” Brown wrote. “I am not inclined to expand the list of those exempt simply because of their occupation.”

Probation officers supervise youth and adult criminal offenders who’ve been sentenced to probation instead of jail or prison. They manage county juvenile detention facilities. Probation departments regularly provide courts with reports about defendants for judges and attorneys to consider during criminal proceedings. The officers also work with local law enforcement officers on various crime-prevention initiatives, and they play a role in efforts to put offenders into career training and other reform programs.

Alanis told the judiciary committee that mandatory jury service pulls probation officers away from these jobs, sometimes for days. This, Alanis said, leaves “defendants unsupervised or unaccountable for extended periods” as the officers wait to be dismissed. He said it’s rare for them to actually end up on a jury because their jobs are seen as too favorable toward the prosecution. 

“The simple presence of a probation officer as a potential juror may create a perception of bias among defendants, attorneys, even fellow jurors, potentially undermining confidence and fairness of a trial,” he said. “In some cases … they may be directly familiar with the individuals involved in the case.”

The lawmaker initially proposed exempting probation officers from all jury service, including civil cases. The latest version only pertains to criminal juries. 

Probation officer faces grilling

San Joaquin County’s chief probation officer, Steve Jackson, told the committee “keeping us eligible is just a wasteful time for the courts.”

Essayli didn’t buy Alanis’s and Jackson’s arguments. He grilled Jackson as if the probation officer was a potential juror sitting in a jury box.

“You’re not saying that probation officers are biased, so they wouldn’t be able to serve on a jury, right?” Essayli asked. 

“No, sir.” 

“OK,” Essayli replied. “So you think you could fairly judge a case and apply the evidence as instructed by prosecutors?”

“Absolutely,” Jackson said, adding that probation officers can be as objective and unbiased about a case as anyone, in large part because they’re “involved daily with the court process.”

“But so is a prosecutor, so is a judge, so is a court clerk,” Essayli said. “So are a lot of people involved in the justice system, and they’re not exempt from jury duty. So why should a probation officer be?”

Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, an attorney from San Ramon, voted for the bill with reservations. She told the committee she worries that exempting too many classes of people from juries could tilt criminal cases unfairly. 

“This would change the balance of how that works in a way that I don’t think is insignificant to remove sort of specific categories of people,” she said. “And that balance is an important one … (to) create this fair jury trial pool. And so I do think we need to do this cautiously.”

Unions support; California courts oppose

Along with probation officers unions, the bill has support from criminal justice reform organizations including ACLU California Action, which argued that “excluding California probation officers from jury duty will reduce the specter of impropriety, decrease bias, and strengthen public trust in the fairness of trials and our judicial system,” according to the bill’s analysis. 

One of the state’s most influential public employee unions, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also supports the bill. The union and its affiliates, some of which represent probation officers, have spent at least $8.6 million supporting members of the Legislature since 2015, according to the Digital Democracy database.

However, the Judicial Council of California, the policy-making body of the state court system, opposes any effort to further reduce the number of people eligible for jury duty.

Prior to 1975, teachers, doctors, faith healers, merchant seamen, clergy, railroad employees, attorneys, peace officers, telephone and telegraph operators, firefighters, military personnel, and dentists were exempt from jury service, according to the council.

Then the Legislature stopped exempting people by their profession and instead gave everyone a right to cite “undue hardship” to request to be relieved of jury service.

In the years since, firefighters, nurses, judges and self-employed people along with various types of law enforcement officers have sought to do what the probation officers are trying to do this year, the judicial council’s Mureed Rasool told the committee.

“The council … believes that statutorily exempting specific categories of persons reduces the number of available jurors, makes it more difficult to select representative juries, and unfairly increases the burden of jury service onto other segments of the population,” he said.