Curious About Jury Duty Selection Process

WBZ

Jury duty. Those two words either make you think about honor, or they make you break into a sweat.

And when you hear that a cat or a baby gets called into jury duty by mistake, it can make you laugh.

Melinda in Sterling Declared her Curiosity:

"How does our state pick people for jury duty? Why are some people always selected while others never get picked?"

David Wade has the answer.

ALWAYS GETTING PICKED

It's 8 a.m. at Suffolk Superior Court. Potential jurors sit and wait with sleep in their eyes. Some are rookies, then there's folks like Maria Puglia. "Since I moved to Boston five years ago, I've been called three times."

At the Jury Commissioner's Call Center, they hear the complaint a lot.

"Massachusetts is the only state in America that uses a mandatory annual census, and that's what we use," said Jury Commissioner Pamela Wood. "The state gets your name from your town census."

WHAT INCREASES YOUR CHANCES OF BEING PICKED?

"If you live in a county like Suffolk that has a low population and high need, you are going to get picked much more often than in a county like Middlesex," said Wood.

Serve, and you're in the clear for three years, but then you're fair game.

HOW ARE PEOPLE PICKED?

In some ways, what they do is similar to pulling names from a hat. No matter how many times your name is picked, after three years, you go back into the system. And you're just as likely to get picked again. However, it's a lot more high-tech than that. Think… algorithms.

Like lottery software, generating random quick picks, the jury commissioner uses severs and math equations to randomly pick jurors. Wood said they have a special algorithm. The "MARSAGLIA" algorithm. "We are very pleased with it. We create a list, numbers are assigned, the list is scrambled, and people are drawn off the list."

So conspiracy theorists take note. The Jury Commissioner's Office says it's just a numbers game.

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