Judge William D. Quarles addressed a Baltimore Circuit courtroom filled with 150 prospective jurors this week: Had anyone heard about the killings of five women on Elmley Avenue in December 1999?
A murmur of recognition rippled through the courtroom. In an instant, almost everyone stood. As the week wore on, scores of them pushed through the squeaky, swinging courtroom doors as they were excused from the case.
Selecting a jury in a violent city with a shrinking population is difficult, particularly when a case becomes notorious. In addition, only about half of the people called for jury duty each day show up, the lowest proportion in the state.
Court officials are trying to change that by improving juror comforts. The hope, says Petit Jury Judge M. Brooke Murdock, is if it wasn't so bad this time, you might be more willing to come in next time. And for a mysteriously high number of city residents, there are several next times.
The midmorning atmosphere of the juror waiting rooms in the turn-of-the-century courthouse brings to mind a bus station where the buses are running late. People complain. They read magazines languidly. They contort themselves into upright sleeping positions. The coffee machine is temperamental, and the bathrooms aren't terribly clean.
Still, it's better than it was. The court has created a "quiet room" for people who want to use their laptops and don't want to watch movies such as "You've Got Mail" on the television sets, a much-appreciated change, according to slips gathered from the suggestion boxes, which are another innovation. (One juror suggested using the waiting masses for court duties such as stuffing envelopes.)
The court staff is trying to get the bathrooms cleaned more often and is working on the coffee problem. It has started a juror newsletter to explain the system and the importance of juries. The newsletter features a "celebrity" juror each issue. The first edition includes comments by Katie Curran O'Malley, the mayor's wife, about how pleasant it was to serve.
Jury Commissioner Marilyn L. Tokarski said the changes don't begin to get at the endemic problems. Baltimore has vastly more criminal cases than any other jurisdiction in the state, and a diminishing, highly transient population. People don't get their summonses, or they ignore them. Many city residents have been crime victims or know others who have been, and are afraid to serve.
"We get two or three letters a week from people who say they have a relative who was murdered," Tokarski said.
The city's jury summons response rate is 50 percent or less. Baltimore County's is about 85 percent.
Then there's the jury pool conundrum: Although juror names are supposedly picked randomly by computer from voter and driver's license lists, many people complain that they are summoned yearly, while others say they have lived in Baltimore for decades without being called.
"We are constantly asking our programmers" why that happens, said jury supervisor Bonnie Raynor.
Tokarski, who has worked at the court for 33 years, said something must be done but that she doesn't know what.
"I can see exactly what the problems are but I can't fix them," she said.
The trial in the five killings, which will begin Monday in Quarles' courtroom, offers a prime example of Baltimore's peculiar juror situation.
Four defendants, three of whom will be tried starting next week, are accused of fatally shooting five women in the basement of a house in Northeast Baltimore, apparently as a warning from one drug gang to another.
To end up with 12 jurors and four or five alternates, Quarles called in 300 people over two days. He had to find a minimum of about 110 people because lawyers on both sides are allowed to dismiss a certain number of jurors they don't want.
One person Quarles dismissed was Tiffany Michelle Brown, a Morgan State University student. She was excited about serving on a jury, she said, but got the jitters when she heard what the case was about. She had been on the pep squad at Western High School with the youngest victim, Makisha Jenkins, 18.
Vanessa Hatten also was excused. She works at the Department of Juvenile Justice and had looked up the defendants' juvenile records for investigators.
An elderly man who didn't want to give his name said he was robbed at gunpoint about the time of the killings while playing boccie in Burdick Park.
A nurse named Darlene said she was too frightened to serve or have her full name published.
"I heard it on television, and I knew I wouldn't be able to be impartial," she said. "It seems like every year I come down here. This stuff, it scares me."
Another woman said she would serve as long as the trial didn't interfere with her plans to cycle across Maryland next month.
"My boss wanted me to lie and say they all should be executed, but I just couldn't," she said.
Although the process isn't foolproof (a former defense lawyer told of a juror whose mental limitations were discovered during verdict deliberations when he repeatedly offered "Happy Thanksgiving" to no one in particular) Murdock and other judges said the jury selection process works.
"Even if half the people come in, it's a wonderful system," she said.
