2022 Crown Communities Award winner: Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts’ jury selection system

The Miami-Dade County Courthouse.

The Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts is revolutionizing the jury selection process. 

In many jurisdictions, jury duty is perceived as an obligatory nuisance. On their appointed day, potential jurors arrive early and stay late. They read books or watch television to pass the time as judges and attorneys make in-person selections from the pool of candidates. It’s a tedious process just about everywhere except for Miami-Dade County, where jurors are in-and-out in an hour or two.

“One-hundred percent, the jurors are happier,” said Luis Montaldo, clerk ad interim at the Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts, about the court’s Direct Reporting jury selection system. He highlighted the experience of a recent juror, a doctor, “who had been on rounds all weekend and had jury duty on a Monday. He came into jury duty, had a direct report, and was notified in an hour that he wasn’t needed.”

For the organization’s innovative approach, the Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts has been selected as a recipient of this year’s American City and County Crown Community Award, an annual merit-based award that recognizes innovative city- and county-level initiatives that have a substantial positive impact on constituents. Articles highlighting other award winners will be published throughout the coming months.

The evolution was wrought through hardship. Like other courts, most of Miami-Dade County’s services moved online when the COVID-19 pandemic descended. But the online format didn’t work for serious criminal trials and high profile civil cases.

“The issue kept coming back. These big trials needed to happen,” Montaldo said, highlighting the importance of an in-person jury selection processs to ensure a fair trial. “With COVID guidelines in place, it was six feet, masks, protective equipment, no congregating. It made things very difficult.”

On average, Melissa Adames, the court’s chief information officer, said Miami-Dade County typically holds about seven or eight trials per week. Covering a population of about 2.7 million people, sifting through enough candidates to fill the required number of jury seats was a monumental undertaking even before the pandemic. During the third week of May, for example, Adames estimated they summoned more than 13,000 potential jurors and scheduled 6,000 for appearance; 1,700 actually showed up.

“When we look at the process prior to the pandemic, folks would have to be at the courthouse at 8 a.m. Traffic was terrible, and they could be there till 4 p.m.,” Adames said.

To get jury trials back up and running during the pandemic, administrators considered all options. They visited venues that could host 200 to 300 socially distanced-people at a time, and contemplated reserving the Miami Heat’s Kaseya Center arena along Biscayne Bay.  

“Those are the extremes we were talking about, because people needed to go to trial,” Montaldo said. “You have people sitting in jail, and justice delayed is justice denied. That was on the minds of the many judges and attorneys here in our circuit.”

But none of the ideas panned out.

“That’s when our team sat down and really leveraged a system we had acquired. Luckily, we had been pushing to get a new system installed, one that was much more flxible than the legacy system we had before,” Montaldo said, referring to Avenu’s Clearview Jury software program, which automates paperwork and lets administrators customize digital management. “I wanted the system to be mobile. I wanted to be able to check in jurors via iPads, iPhones, whatever was necessary.”

Administrators tore the court’s previous juror reporting process down to the studs and rebuilt it digitally. Instead of bringing all candidates in at once, jurors checked in via Zoom. They were given a specific time slot to appear in person, 10-at-a-time. Candidates were asked to fill out an online questionnaire, allowing judges and attorneys to eliminate jurors ahead of time. Digital messaging let administrators directly contact jurors to provide updates, relay reporting instructions, ask questions, delay appointments, or cancel them altogether. Online check-in let jurors report directly to the courtroom without waiting anywhere. The system proved so successful that administrators kept it in place when distancing protocols were lifted. To Montaldo’s knowledge, Miami-Dade County’s Direct Reporting system is the only one like it in the country.

“It changed the paradigm,” he said, noting that an average of 99% of jurors now check-in digitally. “It saves their time.”