Supreme Court of Florida

Transcription

1 Supreme Court of Florida No. AOSC16-66 IN RE: JUROR SELECTION PLAN: PASCO COUNTY ADMINISTRATIVE ORDER Section , Florida Statutes, provides for the selection of jurors to serve within the county by an automated electronic system. Pursuant to that section, the chief judge of the circuit must review and consent to the juror selection process, and the clerk of the circuit court must submit to the Supreme Court of Florida a description of the method for selecting jurors. Section (3), Florida Statutes, charges the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court with the review and approval of the proposed juror selection process, hereinafter referred to as the juror selection plan. The use of technology in the selection of jurors has been customary within Florida for more than 20 years and the Supreme Court has developed standards necessary to ensure that juror selection plans satisfy statutory, methodological, and due process requirements. The Court has tasked the Office of the State Courts Administrator with evaluating proposed plans for compliance with those standards. On July 27, 2016, the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Pasco County submitted the Pasco County Juror Pool Selection Plan for review and approval in accordance

2 with section (2), Florida Statutes. The proposed plan reflects changes to both hardware and software used for juror pool selection in Pasco County. The Office of the State Courts Administrator has completed an extensive review of the proposed Pasco County Juror Selection Plan, including an evaluation of statutory, due process, statistical, and mathematical elements associated with selection of jury candidates. The plan meets established requirements for approval. Accordingly, the attached Pasco County Juror Selection Plan, submitted on July 27, 2016, by The Honorable Paula S. O Neil, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Pasco County, and approved by The Honorable Anthony Rondolino, Chief Judge of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, is hereby approved for use. DONE AND ORDERED at Tallahassee, Florida, on September 21, ATTEST: Chief Justice Jorge Labarga John A. Tomasino, Clerk of Court - 2 -

3 ?aufa S. 0'T,{ei[,?fr.D, Cferfr. & Comptroffer?asco County, ffori{a Mailing Addresses: Dade City: Live Oak Avenue Dade City, FL New Port Richey: P.O. Box 338 New Port Richey, FL Office Locations: Robert D. Sumner Judicial Center Live Oak Avenue, Suite 205 Dade City, FL West Pasco Judicial Center 7530 Little Road, Suite'106 New Port Richey, FL East Pasco Government Center Sixth Street, Suite 20'1 Dade City, FL West Pasco Government Center 8731 Citizens Drive, Suite 220 New Port Richey, FL East Pasco Records Center McDonald Sheet Dade City, FL West Pasco Records Center Jack Albert Records Retention Center 8902 Government Drive New Port Richey, FL Phone: (727) Fax: (727) www. pascoclerk.com Exceffence...A[ways September 6, 2016 Otfice of the State Courts Administrator Attn: P.J. Stockdale, Court Services Supreme Court Building 500 South Duval Street Tallahassee, FL Dear Mr. Enclosed is Pasco County's proposed Juror PoolSelection Plan. Included is detailed information on the proposed hardware, software, random number generator program, and algorithms projected for the jury selection process. The Plan utilizes the Xerox - Agile Jury@ solution, recently approved for Manatee County. Our proposed system uses the same logic and selection processes. The only significant variation is our configuration for multiple courthouse sites and selection by jury districts, which will follow the current selection process permitted by section , Florida Statutes. f n compliance with Florida Statute Section , Chief Judge Anthony Rondolino reviewed the attached documentation and gave his consent to this request, as demonstrated on his enclosed letter. I am requesting review and approval by the Office of the State Courts Administrator and Supreme Court for th'is system. lf you have any questions, please contact me. We are hopefulthat we can upgrade our jury process with this state of the aft jury selection plan. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, / u\*s?aufa S. O'NteiC "n.d. CferQ. of Circuit Court andcotmty Comytroffer?asco County, ftori{a Attachments Cc: The Honorable A. Rondolino, Chief Judge, Sixth Judicial Circuit The Honorable Shawn Crane, Pasco Circuit Administrative Judge

4 ANTHONY RONDOLINO CHIEF JUDGE ~fate ofjtllorib-a: ~ixflr JJuhlcial Qlirru:it ufjtrlurib:a COUNTIES OF PINELLAS AND PASCO lst AVENUE NORTH, ROOM 400 ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA (727) August 3, 2016 PEGGY HUGHES JUDICIAL ASSISTANT PK Jameson State Courts Administrator Supreme Court Building 500 South Duval Street Tallahassee, FL Dear Ms. Jameson: In accordance with Section , Florida Statutes, I hereby certify that I have reviewed the Juror Pool Selection Plan utilizing the Xerox AgileJury application proposed for Pasco County, as submitted by the Honorable Paula S. O'Neil, PhD, Clerk of the Circuit Court and County Comptroller. Subject to approval by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I consent to its use within Pasco County, a party ofthe Sixth Judicial Circuit. AR:ph ~~-- ANTHONY RONDOLINO, Chief Judge Sixth Judicial Circuit

5 PASCO COUNTY PROPOSED JURY POOL SELECTION PLAN The Honorable Paula S. O Neil, PhD, Clerk of the Circuit Court & County Comptroller for Pasco County has determined that our jury application needs to be updated. The current, legacy system was implemented 1998 and is very manual labor intensive. Together with the Florida Court Clerks and Comptrollers (FCCC) service entity CiviTek, the Office participated in the review of available juror selection and management systems, and concurred with the selection of the Xerox AgileJury application to be made available through CiviTek to Clerks of Court in Florida. The agreement between Xerox and Civitek provides for two options: 1) An internetbased system intended for smaller counties wherein the application is hosted by CiviTek on their servers located in Tallahassee; or 2) locally installed applications with Civitek providing 1 st level technical support. Dr. O Neil has chosen to use the latter option with a fully functioning installation in her Office. Our application plan mirrors the recently approved Manatee County Clerk s Office implementation, with the exception that Pasco County utilizes jury districts. The following information will explain our process and serve as our Jury Selection Plan for submission to the Chief Judge and Supreme Court for approval. It is organized to address the Checklist Criteria format as established in Attachment B of the Office of State Courts Administrator Submission of Juror Pool Selection Plans dated April 9, Included by references is a copy of the AgileJury Random Pool Selection Overview technical attachment (marked Attachment A) supplied by Xerox to further explain the actual electronic juror selection methodology. SOURCE LISTS & ADJUSTMENTS As mandated by Florida Statutes (FS) , the sources from which prospective jurors will be drawn: 1. The electronic list provided to the Clerk from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicle (DHSMV) of licensed drivers and Florida identification (ID) card holders, 18 years of age or older, who are citizens of the United States, and legal residents of Florida residing in Pasco County. This listing will be updated on a quarterly basis. 2. Persons filing affidavits pursuant to FS (3). 3. An Exclusion List containing the names of those person previously determined to be not eligible for service for the reasons listed in FS , including but not limited to: physical or mental incapacities; convicted felons; deceased persons;

6 person over the age of 70 years who have requested permanent excusal from jury service; and those who have served as a juror within the previous 12 months. The base juror pool database, referred to by Xerox as the Master Wheel, will be updated monthly for persons to be excluded using sources including the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), and the Florida Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics. Eligibility status changes coming directly to the Clerk s Office staff will be entered as received. JURY DISTRICTS As noted above, Pasco County has utilized jury districts for selection of panels since 1976, based on the authority granted in FS These districts were most recently updated in 2014 through action by the Pasco County Board and County Commissioners and approval by the Chief Judge. Prospective jurors report to either the Robert Sumner Judicial Center in the county seat of Dade City, or to the West Pasco Judicial Center in New Port Richey. These districts are designated using the ZIP code of the residence of the person. In cases where a county-wide panel is required, the jurors are randomly selected from the combined East Pasco and West Pasco Jury Districts. EQUIPMENT & SECURITY The jury application will run on a Hewlett Packard (HP) ProLiant BL460c Gen8 Blade Server cluster running VMWARE 5.5. Data storage will be handled by a HP 3Par 7200 san using the AgileJury SQL Server database format. The equipment will be housed in the Clerk & Comptrollers secure server room in the East Pasco Government Center in Dade City, Florida. Online access will be through our BrightHouse internet link with data residing in our DMZ behind our firewalls. The juror database files will be regularly backed-up using evault and stored in multiple off-site locations. The Clerk of the Circuit Court & County Comptroller of Pasco County is designated the official custodian of the computer file of the list of persons to be used in jury selection and shall insure the file is not accessible to anyone other than those directly involved in the selection of venires. All user access to the application data base and programs will be limited to Deputy Clerks authorized by Clerk & Comptroller O Neil. METHODS AND MODE OF OPERATION The method used to randomly select jurors from the master jury list ( Master Wheel ) is set forth by the process described in attached Attachment A. JURY MANAGEMENT Beyond juror selection, the implementation of the AgileJury application will greatly enhance the Clerk s management of jurors through the other phases of the juror service process including: reporting notifications; check in; background questionnaires; assignment to a particular trial panel; seating charts; re-assignment to the pool; compensation; profile updates and reporting.

7 Attachment A AgileJury Random Pool Selection Overview Within a One Step Court Updated 05/22/2015

8 Microsoft, and SQL Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners Xerox Business Services, a Xerox Company. All rights reserved. Xerox and Xerox and Design and Way2Go Card and AgileJury are trademarks of Xerox Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

9 AgileJury Random Pool Selection Overview The right to a jury trial is protected by both state and federal constitutions. Jury service is one of the most important civic duties a citizen can perform. The protection of rights and liberties in courts is achieved through the teamwork of a judge and jury. Jurors are the representatives of the community. A randomly selected jury assures that the parties get a jury of their peers. AgileJury encompasses all aspects of jury management, including randomly selecting prospective jurors. AgileJury Master Wheel Person records are added into the AgileJury system as directed by the court or state. They typically come from DMV or Voter Registration lists. These are often known as the master wheel, the master list or source list. Court Jurisdiction Pool Selection Methods Jurisdictions for pool selection are defined for each court location during AgileJury setup. The term court location is used throughout this document to define a single court or group of courts with common rules and policies. The AgileJury system can retrieve a subset of person records: 1) If the person lives within a particular city or town 2) If the person is assigned a particular jurisdiction or precinct code using court defined criteria 3) If the person s ZIP code is within a court defined ZIP Code group Even though the master list can be quite huge, AgileJury determines which sub group of available person records to use for each court location. One person record can fall within the jurisdiction of multiple courts. Available Person Records The available person records, in the AgileJury system, represent the people who are currently eligible to be selected for a jury pool. Available people are: 1) People who have never been selected for jury duty. 2) People who have been selected previously, but have past their court defined exemption period (their next available date is less than or equal to the pool report date). 3) People who have been temporarily disqualified, excused, or exempt but their next available date is less than or equal to the pool report date. Next Available Date Each person record contains a date representing the earliest date that an eligible person can serve. This date is used in random pool selection to guarantee that no person is called more often than is allowed by statute or policy. If a person is permanently disqualified, excused, or exempt, they are not eligible to serve.

10 Postponement and FTA The AgileJury system allows people selected on a pool to postpone their service to a later date. Failure to Appear (FTA) also assigns the person a new attendance date. AgileJury Pool Creation Creating a pool is one of the fundamental features of the AgileJury system. The user selects the following criteria to begin the pool selection process: 1) Court Location 2) Pool Type 3) Report Date & Time 4) Report Status 5) Regular/Special Pool 6) Number of members 7) Number or percentage of postponements 8) Number or percentage of FTAs The system then creates the pool using the entered criteria. If postponed people are requested, the system finds all available people that are postponed to the pool creation date (or earlier) for this Court Location. It then randomly selects the requested number postponed people and adds them to the pool. If FTA people are requested, the system finds all FTA people that are postponed to the pool creation date (or earlier) for this Court Location. It then randomly selects the requested number of FTA people and adds them to the pool. If more people are required to fill the pool, the system selects only the person ID from all available person records within a subset of the database using one of the pre-defined methods (City code, Jurisdiction code, or ZIP Code group). The database associates each person ID with a random number, then sorts the person ID list by this random number and selects the number of person IDs necessary from the top of the list. This person ID list is passed back to Java, and added to the jury pool to finalize the pool with the number of people requested by the user. Some random number generators pick the n th person on a list, and can therefore by poor or nonrobust randomization, have holes where elements of the list can never be selected. The AgileJury method assigns a random number to every available person ID; giving each person the same chance of being sorted to the top of the list. Random Number Generation It is imperative that juries are selected at random from a fair cross section of the community. Any generation of random numbers using a computer, however, is not truly random, but only pseudorandom. To generate random numbers, computers use a Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG). Within the limitations of pseudorandom generators, any quality pseudorandom number generator must: 1) have a uniform distribution of values 2) have no detectable pattern, i.e. generate numbers with no correlations between successive numbers 3) have a very long cycle length

11 4) have no, or easily avoidable, weak initial conditions which produce patterns or short cycles A cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator (CSPRNG) is far more random than the data generated by the typical PRNG. This feature makes it suitable for use in cryptography. In order for a random number generator to be cryptographically secure, in addition to the qualifications for a PRNG: Every CSPRNG should satisfy the next-bit test. That is, given the first k bits of a random sequence, there is no polynomial-time algorithm that can predict the (k+1)th bit with probability of success better than 50%. Andrew Yao proved in 1982 that a generator passing the next-bit test will pass all other polynomial-time statistical tests for randomness. Every CSPRNG should withstand "state compromise extensions". In the event that part or all of its state has been revealed (or guessed correctly), it should be impossible to reconstruct the stream of random numbers prior to the revelation. Additionally, if there is an entropy input while running, it should be infeasible to use knowledge of the input's state to predict future conditions of the CSPRNG state.* * For more information on CSPRNG, please see CSPRNGs are available within both Oracle s database and Microsoft s SQL Server database. AgileJury allows the court to determine what random function is used and how many bytes are necessary within its configuration properties. If AgileJury is running on a SQL Server database, the default function is CRYPT_GEN_RANDOM(32). This function uses the Microsoft Cryptographic Application Programming Interface (also known as Crypto API or CAPI). For more information on Microsoft CAPI, please see: and If AgileJury is running on an Oracle database, the default function is DBMS_CRYPTO.RANDOMBYTES(32). For more information, please see: Passing 32 as the parameter causes these built-in functions pass back a 32 byte hexadecimal value to produce 16^64 or approximately 1.15e+77 possible outcomes. These cryptographic processes are self-seeding; however they also allow external seeding. The same external seed value produces different output. For Example: select CRYPT_GEN_RANDOM(32, 0xF17C271BD0F48F0DAAC217D4599E81E42B9EDECFCB4247D701037E9D0DF27CE4) Example of first call: 0x04EC3F87F1B D0B76984DE1CD2E982E3D D02AF49C F select CRYPT_GEN_RANDOM(32, 0xF17C271BD0F48F0DAAC217D4599E81E42B9EDECFCB4247D701037E9D0DF27CE4) Example of second call: 0x5863E7DD200567AA8D952CA66A903963CD33A3A88B95CEEF8043B690B2F81504

12 Seeding Microsoft is very elusive in their seeding methodology. According to Microsoft: With Microsoft CSPs, CryptGenRandom uses the same random number generator used by other security components. This allows numerous processes to contribute to a system-wide seed. CryptoAPI stores an intermediate random seed with every user. To form the seed for the random number generator, a calling application supplies bits it might have for instance, mouse or keyboard timing input that are then combined with both the stored seed and various system data and user data such as the process ID and thread ID, the system clock, the system time, the system counter, memory status, free disk clusters, the hashed user environment block. This result is used to seed the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG).... If an application has access to a good random source, it can fill the pbbuffer buffer with some random data before calling CryptGenRandom. The CSP then uses this data to further randomize its internal seed. It is acceptable to omit the step of initializing the pbbuffer buffer before calling CryptGenRandom. Before creating a pool, AgileJury seeds the random number generator using HASHBYTES 'SHA2_256' and a combination of NewID(), GetUTCDate() plus a 42 character alphanumeric constant. This will help create a more uniformly distributed salt value. Additional calls to the CryptGenRandom function during the pool creation process seed themselves. For more information on seeding please see: Conclusion The validity of a pseudo-random number generator for juror selection depends on many factors such as how the algorithm is initialized, how the name lists are prepared and how the generator output is linked to candidate names. Every day, the lists of available person records for each court location change, as pools are created in AgileJury and people serve, are excused or disqualified. When creating a new pool, the system retrieves all available person records for that court location. By definition, this list changes every time a new pool is created. Only the juror ID is selected and paired with a cryptography secure pseudo-random number, removing the possibility of using any biographical information in the selection process. After sorting on the random number and retrieving a small list of person IDs, only then are the person records added to the pool using the juror ID. This blind randomization insures that jurors come from a fair distribution of members of the community and that AgileJury will allow the parties to truly have a jury of their peers.