Jury verdicts in question

When an obscure local rule was changed in September, it suddenly made life a whole lot easier for people called to jury duty in King County.

Instead of pulling potential jurors from all corners of the county for criminal trials at two Superior Court courthouses, the county began assigning jurors to cases based on geography: Those who lived south of Interstate 90 were assigned to cases at the Kent courthouse, and those north of I-90 were assigned to downtown Seattle.

The move reduced commute times and traffic hassles, and made jury duty — which requires citizens to report as often as every two years and pays them about $10 a day — a bit more palatable.

But a ruling Thursday by a King County Superior Court judge calls the jury-pool division unconstitutional, saying the potential for a socio-economic imbalance among juries threatens fairness.

The strongly worded decision potentially calls into question hundreds of criminal verdicts rendered since Sept. 1. In it, Judge Cheryl Carey cites case law dating back to the 1800s when a jury that wasn't drawn from the entire county sentenced a slave to hang. Her ruling has judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and court administrators scrambling to figure out what to do.

"The danger is that ... on appeal, other people's convictions will be overturned," said senior deputy prosecuting attorney Scott Peterson, who argued before Carey, unsuccessfully, that the new rule was legal.

The next move is to have the issue heard by the state Court of Appeals or the state Supreme Court as soon as possible.

"Our main concern at this point is to resolve any legal challenges as quickly and efficiently as possible," said Jim Whisman, a supervising attorney in the King County Prosecutor's Office appellate unit. "We would hope to move quickly if we decide an appeal is warranted," he said in an e-mail Friday.

After the Legislature enacted a law in 2005 that allowed counties to split their jury pools, King County — the only county in the state that has two Superior Court courthouses — changed its rules Sept. 1.

The main motivation was to lessen the hardship on the approximately 150,000 potential jurors summoned each year, Peterson said.

"If you live in Lake City and have to be at the [Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center] in Kent at 8:30 in the morning, that's a hardship. They're being summoned clear across the county."

For example, if a resident of Skykomish — one of the county's most far-flung towns — was summoned to a Kent trial, he would have to travel 76 miles, much of that on country roads, for a one-way trip of about 90 minutes, according to an online mapping calculator. And that's barring a major traffic accident, storm or other delays.

If a potential juror from Enumclaw needed to take the bus to the downtown Seattle courthouse, he would have to leave just after 6 a.m. and take two buses, with a 40-minute wait between a transfer.

"What we wanted was convenience for the jurors," said Superior Court Judge Laura Inveen, chairwoman of the Superior Court jury committee.

It was hoped the new method would even convince more citizens to actually show up for jury duty, the judges reasoned. Only about a quarter of those summoned for jury duty make it into the courthouse they're ordered to visit, according to the court's administration.

Though they believed the new method to be constitutional, Inveen said, the judges wanted to get a formal ruling by a higher court before they enacted the rule. So they opted to test the new selection process before it went into effect.

They selected two test periods of two weeks each, during which they split the jury pools on low-level criminal cases, such as drug cases, and advised defense attorneys they could appeal their clients' convictions based on the pool division.

During the first test period, Inveen said, there were no convictions to appeal. During the second one, no defense attorneys wanted to appeal.

"We realized perhaps we weren't going to get somebody to raise it in a case like this, in a not-so-serious case," she said. So after a lot of discussion, "we felt we were on strong legal grounds to pass the rule implementing the legislation."

But Thursday, Judge Carey threw a wrench into things.

According to her opinion, the rule violates the article of the state constitution that provides people accused of crimes the right to a speedy public trial by "an impartial jury of the county in which the offense is charged to have been committed."

"Efficiency and convenience should not be the sole consideration when determining whether individuals are being provided a random and proportional jury pool," Carey wrote. "Such a provision is a cherished right, not to be taken lightly."

The challenge first arose in Carey's court as part of the high-profile case against John Gilbert Conte, an associate of longtime Seattle strip-club operators Frank Colacurcio Sr. and Frank Colacurcio Jr.

The case has yet to go to trial. It charges the Colacurcios, Conte and Marsha Furfaro with scheming to bypass campaign-contribution limits and funnel thousands of dollars to former Seattle City Council members Judy Nicastro, Heidi Wills and Jim Compton, at a time that Colacurcio Jr. was seeking council approval for expanded parking at his Lake City strip club.

In pretrial hearings, Conte's attorney, Richard Hansen, argued that the new jury-pool division, based purely on geography, ignores critical socio-economic differences between North and South King County — such as higher poverty levels in Kent and higher education levels in Bellevue — and prevents a jury from being drawn from a fair cross-section of residents.

"It's really going to distort the jury pools," he said.

Ultimately, a final ruling by a higher court could affect some or many of the verdicts rendered since September, including the theft conviction of former Huling Brothers Auto Center salesman Paul Rimbey and Nikolay Sloboda's conviction for stabbing to death the son of a King County sheriff's deputy.

But no one is really sure. In the meantime, the judges may decide to revert to the old countywide system.

"We'll probably resume discussions," Inveen said.

Carey's opinion doesn't necessarily doom the new jury division, said Paul Sherfey, spokesman for the court. Two other Superior Court judges have ruled in recent months that the new approach is constitutional, he said.

"Everyone had some angst around this, and it really was processed for a long time," he added. "I think in the end the judges did feel on the whole that this was constitutional."

Natalie Singer: 206-464-2704 or nsinger@seattletimes.com