The H1N1 epidemic reached into the Allen County halls of justice this week, causing a precipitous drop in the number of people available for jury duty.
Court officials were shocked Tuesday morning when, after calling a normal jury pool of about 50 people for a criminal trial in Allen Superior Court, only 29 showed up, Allen Superior Court Judge Fran Gull said.
“That’s an extraordinarily huge drop,” she said, adding normal jury turnout is about 85 percent.
Jury administrator Lynn Murphy said many of the people who called in to court offices to defer their service claimed they suffered from the flu or needed to care for an ailing family member.
And she saw it before she even got to her office, sending home a potential juror she saw wearing a mask and coughing as she walked.
In her 11 years in the position, it was the highest absenteeism rate Murphy has seen.
“(Tuesday) was somewhat of a shock,” she said.
If there is more than one jury trial going on in the Courthouse on any given day, it is not uncommon for court officials to pull leftover potential jurors from one courtroom into another if they are running low on jurors during the selection process. But on Tuesday, with only one criminal trial scheduled, Murphy said Allen Superior Court Judge John Surbeck whittled the pool down to one remaining potential juror before a panel was selected.
“We were sweating bullets,” she said.
If the judge and the lawyers cannot get a jury picked, they have to start over, causing delays and extra expenses.
So now Murphy is going to increase the number of people brought in for jury duty by about a dozen for each case for the foreseeable future.
“We’ll probably have more people than we need, but it’s better than having a mistrial because we don’t have enough people,” she said.
