Court officials look to improve jury duty responses

ANTIGO — In Sept. 2023, Langlade County Clerk of Courts Tina Wild sent nearly 1,000 questionnaires out around the county.

The questionnaires are sent out every year by court officials and essentially serve as a preliminary mechanism by which to vet potential jurors in case of a trial. The questions they contain are mostly basic, biographical ones: Are you employed? Do you have a mental disability? Have you ever been convicted of a crime?

Despite how simple responding to the questionnaires should have been, some who received them had difficulties with one part of the process.

Returning them.

Out of the exactly 993 questionnaires sent out, 51 simply were not returned — even after two more letters demanding it were sent.

“They had been given three chances,” Judge John Rhode said. “It was sent to them, and they didn’t return it. It was sent to them with a reminder notice, and they didn’t return it. It was sent to them a third time with a final reminder notice, and they still didn’t return it. So then we had the sheriff’s office serve them and summon them to appear, and even on that, it said, ‘But you don’t have to appear if you just do what we’ve asked you to do three times already.’”

Though it was later learned that well over half of the 51 people on the list were not responding because they had moved out of the county without notice, Rhode still called so many failing to comply with the court order a “disturbing trend.”

“It wasn’t as bad as we feared. Out of those 15 or so the sheriff’s office served, more than 10 finally did it, and then I had three show up, and out of those three that showed up, two of them did it right there, so I let them go without any consequence. But one did not show up, and I imposed a $500 fine,” Rhode said, adding that another person also was fined $500 for not following similar jury duty requirements. “I could also put them in jail. I did not choose to do an arrest warrant to put them in jail, but I fined them I guess to send a message that this is not to be taken lightly. Our system of justice depends on people serving on juries. We can’t do our work without that.”

Rhode said one man he fined actually had filled out the questionnaire, but then, when he was ordered to come to the courthouse to serve in a juror pool, he refused, saying he had to work (an illegitimate excuse, given that employers must allow employees off without consequence to serve in juries). As to why so many questionnaires weren’t filled out, Wild said she was given a different excuse.

“Some did call me back and say that they thought it was their right and their choosing if they wanted to be on jury duty, and I said, ‘That’s false and you need to comply,’” she said.

Langlade County Court Commissioner Brent DeBord said that to him, the proliferation of this type of attitude among the current body politic is unsurprising.

“It’s part of our political culture now, being anti-government,” DeBord said. “It’s grown within my lifetime significantly, that mentality. What was once fringe is now far more common than it used to be. People say, ‘We’re not going to cooperate with the government.’ It’s a general anti-government attitude: they don’t want to participate in government. But the jury box is one of our essential duties as citizens of this nation.”

In Langlade County, too, this is perhaps more true now than ever in recent memory. In 2024, substantially more jury trials than in previous years are scheduled to take place.

According to Rhode, this is due in part to the court finally confronting a backlog of jury trials that developed during the COVID lockdowns, during which they were barred from taking place, as well as because of a spate of sexual assault cases.

“We have had a large number of reported sexual assaults that the prosecutor’s office has found to be credible,” Rhode said. “If you find them credible, you’re supposed to charge them, and those are cases that are really very difficult to settle. When you’re looking at 10 or 20 years and being a sex offender for life, those are hard cases to settle.”

Wild said county citizens cooperating in the jury pool system is critical.

“I just feel that jury duty is your civic duty, and when the court sends you something, you need to know the importance of it and comply with what we’re sending you. We all may need a jury trial someday — you never know,” said Wild, adding that she likely will have to send out more preliminary questionnaires this summer to man all the jury trials in the fall.

DeBord said juries have a unique responsibility.

“We’re asking 12 everyday citizens to evaluate a situation and tell us, to the best that they can discern, who to believe and what to believe,” he said. “The jury is the finder of fact: judges are just the umpires that make sure everybody’s following the rules. But in the end, it is the jury who says who should be believed in and who should not be believed in.”

Rhode suggested those who sit on juries are changed by the gravity of the experience.

“I’m always amazed when people are done serving on a jury how proud they are of themselves,” Rhode said. “I know they have a great sense of accomplishment. It’s agonizing sometimes to reach decisions on hard things, but you can always tell there’s a sense of satisfaction about them that they know they’ve done something very important and necessary.”