Texas Law Says Jury Panels Must Be Chosen Randomly. A Brazoria County Official Had a Different Idea.
For at least six years, the district clerk in Brazoria County used a highly unusual and possibly illegal system to assemble jury panels. Under state law, jurors are supposed to be selected at random from the pool of those who’ve been called to jury duty. But Rhonda Barchak, a Republican who served as district clerk in the fast-growing county that stretches from the Houston suburbs to the Gulf Coast, had her own method. Barchak, who resigned in late August after having held the post since 2010, divided up jurors by geographical region, and then by race, to assemble panels for criminal, civil, and family-law trials. As a result of her idiosyncratic system, thousands of verdicts could potentially be overturned, and the county could face an avalanche of lawsuits claiming wrongful convictions.
Brazoria County district attorney Tom Selleck first acknowledged what he termed “irregularities” in an August 25 public statement, writing that “jury trial panels may have been assembled in a manner inconsistent with applicable statutes and laws.” Two days later, Selleck announced that he had asked the Texas Rangers’ Public Integrity Unit to investigate. “The law requires jurors be selected at random,” said Selleck, also a Republican, “and it is this process that is alleged to have been conducted improperly.”
Civil rights activists, who have protested several times in front of the Brazoria County courthouse, allege that Barchak was rigging juries to put non-white defendants at a disadvantage. While Barchak has remained silent since stepping down, her attorney, Chip Lewis, gave Texas Monthly an account—published here for the first time—of her method of selecting jurors, asserting that her only aim was to assemble a “representative cross section” of the county’s population.
As in all Texas counties, eligible Brazoria residents are summoned to jury duty at random, based on an electronic list provided by the Texas Secretary of State. But when the selected jurors in Brazoria arrived for duty—usually on Monday mornings at the county courthouse in Angleton—Barchak’s method of dividing them up for trials diverged sharply from the systems used by other Texas district clerks, who typically draw cards randomly from a stack or use technology to automate a random selection.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/brazoria-county-jury-panels/
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