Supreme Court of Florida

Transcription

1 Supreme Court of Florida No. AOSC11-20 IN RE: JUROR SELECTION PLAN: MONROE COUNTY ADMINISTRATIVE ORDER Section , Florida Statutes, provides for the selection of jurors to serve within the county by mechanical, electronic, or electrical device. Pursuant to that section, a majority of judges within the circuit in which the county resides must approve, and the chief judge of the circuit must submit, a description of the method for selecting jurors to the Supreme Court of Florida. Section (3), Florida Statutes, charges 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

2 Administrator with evaluating proposed plans to determine their compliance with those standards. On May 17, 2011, the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Monroe County submitted the Monroe County Juror Selection Plan, with certification from the Chief Judge of the Sixteenth Judicial Circuit, for review and approval in accordance with section (2), Florida Statutes. The proposed plan reflects changes to both hardware and software used for juror pool selection in Monroe County. The Office of the State Courts Administrator has completed an extensive review of the proposed Monroe 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 Monroe County Juror Selection Plan, submitted on May 17, 2011 by The Honorable Danny L. Kolhage, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Monroe County, and certified by The Honorable Luis M. Garcia, Chief Judge of the Sixteenth Judicial Circuit, is hereby approved for use

3 DONE AND ORDERED at Tallahassee, Florida, on June 30, Chief Justice Charles T. Canady ATTEST: Thomas D. Hall, Clerk of Court - 3 -

4 MONROE COUNTY COURTHOUSE BRANCH OFFICE: 500 WHITEHEAD STREET, SUITE 101 PLANTATION KEY KEY WEST, FLORIDA GOVERNMENT CENTER TEL. (305) OVERSEAS HIGHWAY FAX (305) PLANTATION KEY, FLORIDA TEL. (305) BRANCH OFFICE: FAX (305) MARATHON SUB COURTHOUSE 3117 OVERSEAS HIGHWAY CLERK OF THE CIRCUIT COURT ROTH BUILDING MARATHON, FLORIDA HIGH POINT ROAD TEL. (305) MONROE COUNTY PLANTATION KEY, FLORIDA FAX (305) TEL. (305) FAX (305) May 17,2011 Court Services Office of the State Courts Administrator Supreme Court Building 500 South Duval Street Tallahassee, FL Dear Court Services: Enclosed for your review is the Juror Pool Selection Plan for Monroe County. Included are the proposed hardware, software, random number generator program and algorithms to be used in the jury selection process. We are seeking Office of the State Courts Administrator review and Supreme Court approval of this process. Chief Judge, Luis Garcia has reviewed the attached documentation. A signed statement indicating her/his review is attached. Please let me know if there is any other information that I may provide to you. I look forward to the Court's approval ofthe proposed jury pool selection plan. Thank you. Sincerely, Attachments Monroe County

5 xc: The Honorable David Audlin, Chief Judge Holly Elomina, Trial Court Administrator

6 JUDICIAL ASSISTANTS: SIXTEENTH LUIS M. GARCIA CHIEF CIRCUIT OF FLORIDA PLANTATION KEY GOVERNMENT CENTER ROBIN BARBER, CLA OVERSEAS HIGHWAY TELEPHONE (305) RENEE PARKER TAVERNIER, FLORIDA FAX (305) May 13,2011 Office ofthe State Courts Administrator Att'n: Court Services 500 S. Duval Street Tallahassee, FL RE: Jury Selection Plan for Monroe County Dear Court Services: I hereby certify that a majority ofjudges authorized to conduct trials in Monroe County within my circuit have voted to approve the proposed jury pool selection plan enclosed herein. If I may be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact my office. Sincerely, Luis M. Chief Judge Enclosure cc: Honorable Danny Kolhage, Clerk of Court Holly Elomina, Trial Court Administrator

7 JURY SELECTION PLAN FOR MONROE COUNTY Section , Florida Statutes, authorizes the use of an electronic device as an alternative to other methods authorized by law for obtaining jury venires and further requires that a description of the equipment, methods and mode of operation to be used shall be transmitted to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The present method of selecting jurors can be expedited in compliance with Sections and , Florida Statutes, without loss of sanctity of random selection by the use of the electronic computer available through the Monroe County Clerk of the Court's Management Information Systems Division. The source of such selection is a list provided by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (DHSMV) to the Clerk of the Court in Monroe County which is in computer compatible form and under the custody and control of the Clerk of the Court of Monroe County and to which may be added individuals who have executed the affidavit prescribed in Section , Florida Statutes. The Sixteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida (Monroe County) shall utilize the following equipment, methodology and procedures to insure the selection of a random, fair and impartial jury. 1) Creation of Initial Candidate Selection List: A) The sources from which names shall be taken is 1) the DHSMV database of persons whose addresses are in Monroe County, a copy of which is certified by the DHSMV, and 2) individuals who have executed the affidavit prescribed in F.S , and 3) exclusion lists containing those persons who are unable to serve, have already served, or whose service is otherwise excused or postponed.

8 B) The DHSMV source list is imported directly into a database with no pre-sorts performed. The names are numbered using a juror identification number, which is sequentially assigned when loaded into the Master Juror Table in the database. Each DHSMV record is compared against the Juror Master Table by driver's license number to see if it exists in the system. If the DHSMV record exists, the address information is used to update the Juror Master Table. An audit record is added indicating that the loading process updated the record. If the DHSMV record does not exist, it is added to the Juror Master Table. An audit record is added indicating that the loading process added the record. The Juror Master Table is then checked against the DHSMV file. Any jurors in the Juror Master Table that were not added by affidavit or are not actively serving on a panel or pool and are not in the DHSMV file are flagged as inactive in the Juror Master Table. In the future, inactive jurors will be moved to an archive table along with their activity history. Individuals who have executed affidavits are added directly into the Juror Master table upon receipt by the Monroe County Clerk s Office. C) The DHSMV source list is used to update the Juror Master Table quarterly. The Clerk's Office adds executed affidavits to the Juror Master table upon receipt. A list of deceased persons is obtain from the Florida Department of Health, Office of Vital Statistics, to update the Juror Master List monthly. All other exclusions are processed upon receipt. D) The Initial Jury Selection Candidate List is comprised of eligible names stored in the Juror Master Table. Names are considered eligible to be juror candidates if they have not been flagged for exclusion as discussed in Paragraph 1E. All eligible candidates will be loaded as an element into a collection array (java.uti1.arraylist) based on the selection of one of four locations (Key West, Marathon, Plantation Key and All Monroe County). Each location represents a group of zip codes that will be utilized to include candidate elements in the collection array based on the candidate s address zip code. Each candidate

9 element is assigned an integer index value as it is added to the collection. Any juror exclusions are done prior to adding them to the collection, therefore the index values are perfectly sequential and have no breaks in the sequence. E) The exclusion principles are as follows: (1) candidates that have an exclusion flag per Florida Statute and (2) candidates whose service is rescheduled (per F.S ) outside the date range of this selection, (3) names flagged as exceptions and, (4) candidates with an address zip code not matching a zip code in the zip code group for Key West, Marathon, Plantation Key or All of Monroe County. Excusal requests, pursuant to , are processed from approved excusal forms, or at the direction of the presiding judge, by input into the Jury Management System. Any prospective juror who reports for service is automatically flagged by the Jury Management System as exempt for one year from the last day of service. Each month the Monroe County Clerk of Courts receives a listing of persons who died during the preceding calendar month. These names are compared against the Juror Master Table and matches are flagged for permanent exclusion from the Initial Jury Selection Candidate List. In accordance with F.S (4), the system will make provisions to submit monthly the names and other identifying information about the persons selected for the jury list. FDLE will return an automated file of matching records of potential jurors who should be disqualified. Those jurors will be updated manually in the Juror Master Table as being ineligible to serve as a juror. Names with an address zip codes not matching a zip code in location table Key West, Marathon, Plantation Key or All of Monroe County are flagged by the system as exceptions. Names flagged as exceptions are checked and either corrected or remain flagged as excluded from the candidate list. 2) Name Selection: A) The equipment utilized for jury selection will be the Dell Power Edge R610 server, 2 Intel Xeon x5650 Processors, 24GB RAM with 438GB of available

10 hard drive space. The Server will run the Window 2008 Server Standard R2 Operating System and will be located in a Secured facility under the control of the MIS Department of the Monroe County Clerk of the Court. The application software will be Corrus (formerly Aeontec) JuryFlex. B) The application hardware will be housed in a secured area within the Monroe County Lester Building. Access is limited to authorized personnel only. The application is password protected with user security levels. The jury pool is selected randomly using a random sequence, which is linked to the selected jury list and is electronically archived within the database. C) With the selection of a location (Key West, Marathon, Plantation Key or All Monroe County) from a dropdown list, the software will select a list of eligible names from the Juror Master List. The list is generated by executing a "SQL select statement" which uses the address zip code group (Key West, Marathon, Plantation Key or All Monroe County) and table exclusion flags to filter out the ineligible names discussed in Paragraph 1E. The eligible names are assigned an index value and stored in a table in system memory. The system first adds any rescheduled jurors whose reschedule date range matches the jury pool date range. A random number generator is then initialized and utilized to select the remaining jurors from the Initial Jury Selection Candidate List. Each random number generated is used sequentially as produced and matched with an index value for an eligible name until the number of Jurors requested have been drawn. If a random number generated matches an index value from the Initial Jury Selection Candidate List that was previously selected, the program will log the duplicate in the audit log, and request a new random number from the generator. All randomly selected eligible names are then assigned to a juror pool and saved in the Jury Management System database.

11 D) This system uses a named pseudo-random number generator (PRNG), Mersenne TwisterFast, for name selection. A detailed description of Mersenne TwisterFast is found below. Version 9, based on version MT199937(99/10/29) of the Mersenne Twister algorithm found at The Mersenne Twister Home Pane, with the initialization improved using the new initialization algorithm By Sean Luke, October MersenneTwisterFast is not a subclass of java.util.random. It has the same public methods as Random does, however, and it is algorithmically identical to MersenneTwister. MersenneTwisterFast has hard-code inlined all of its methods directly, and made all of them final (well, the ones of consequence anyway). Further, these methods are not synchronized, so the same MersenneTwisterFast instance cannot be shared by multiple threads. But all this helps MersenneTwisterFast achieve well over twice the speed of MersenneTwister. java.util.random is about 113 slower than MersenneTwisterFast. About the Mersenne Twister This is a Java version of the C-program for MT19937: Integer version. The MT19937 algorithm was created by Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura, who ask: "When you use this, send an to: maturnoto@math.keio.ac.jp with an appropriate reference to your work". Indicate that this is a translation of their algorithm into Java. Reference. Makato Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura, "Mersenne Twister: A 623-Dimensionally Equidistributed Uniform Pseudo-Random Number Generator", ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, Vol. 8,

12 No. 1, January 1998, pp The MersenneTwister code is based on standard MT19937 C/C++ code by Takuji Nishimura, with suggestions from Topher Cooper and Marc Rieffel, July The code was originally translated into Java by Michael Lecuyer, January 1999, and the original code is Copyright (c) 1999 by Michael Lecuyer. E) The PRNG will be initialized by an application dialog screen that will prompt the user to move the mouse within an area of the screen. The X and Y coordinates are multiplied together and stored in an array in system memory until the required 624 seeds are captured. The integer seeds are in the range of 0 to and are passed to the PRNG at runtime. Users are not allowed to continue until all required seeds have been captured by the dialog. A screen shot of the dialog is shown below: F) Jurors are selected according to the random number that is generated by the PRNG. The PRNG has a method which returns an integer drawn uniformly from 0 to the total number of jurors in the initial candidate list minus one. G) To ensure verifiability in the process, the system records an audit trail in the

13 database of the entire random process. The generated seeds are stored in a database table along with a time stamp and the Pool information (such as the number of jurors requested). The random numbers generated by the PRNG are stored in a related database table, along with the juror that was picked using that random number (as per section 2(f)).The date that potential jurors where added or inactivated from the master list is also recorded. As a result, it is possible to re- create the state of the master list at any given time, and verify the results of the selection. 3) Production of Final candidate List: A) The Clerk of the Court of Monroe County is designated the official custodian of the computer records of the lists to be used in jury selection and shall ensure they are not accessible to anyone other than those directly involved in selection of venires as herein provided. Deputy Clerks may perform functions of the Clerk of the Court. B) The Clerk of the Court shall cause Monroe County petit and grand jury venires to be randomly selected from the certified DHSMV list programmed into the computer / server along with the list of individuals who have executed the affidavit prescribed in Section , Florida Statutes. To achieve this goal, the Clerk of the Court shall develop and employ a random number generator and other procedures as described in paragraph 2c and 2e above. For example, Petit jury venires will be selected for an office location by selecting one of the address zip code groups, Key West, Marathon or Plantation Key, from the system dropdown list referenced in 2c above. Grand jury venires will be selected by selecting the address zip code group, All Monroe County, from the system dropdown list also referenced in 2c above. C) The Chief Judge or his/her designee shall determine the number of prospective jurors not fewer than 250 persons (per F.S ) for each venire.

14 D) At the direction of the Chief Judge or his/her designee, pursuant to Section , Florida Statutes, the Clerk of the Court shall draw by random selection from the computerized lists as described in paragraph 1 above, venires of the requested number of prospective jurors. This procedure shall apply to lists of names drawn for potential service as circuit and statewide grand jurors as well. The Jury Clerk shall keep copies of the venires in a secure place. Access to copies of the venires is expressly prohibited without the permission of the Chief Judge. From the list generated, the Clerk of the Court shall print summonses, which shall be mailed in accordance with the applicable statutes. E) If a prospective juror indicates that he/she is temporarily unable to serve on the date set in the initial summons, the Jury Clerk is not authorized to grant a continuance. Instead, the qualifying judge determines if a continuance should be granted, then authorizes the Jury Clerk to set a date convenient for the prospective juror and court. Such date for jury duty shall be set within sixty days of the date on the initial summons. F) Extensions beyond the sixty days, requests for additional continuances, or requests for continuances must be made in writing to the qualifying Judge. Information regarding deferral of jury duty shall be entered into the selection system and the postponed juror shall be resummoned for the new designated date. All continuance, affidavits, letters and associated documents will be scanned as document images into the system.