FORT VALLEY — Inside the Colonial Revival courthouse here on a recent chilly afternoon, two dozen people spread out on hardwood benches in Peach County Superior Court to await their fates.
A subject at the heart of American citizenship sat front and center. For whatever reason, a month and a half earlier they had failed to show up for jury duty.
They’d been rounded up by sheriff’s deputies to explain why. They weren’t so much in criminal trouble. They were, in essence, grown-ups called to the principal’s office.
Here, the principal was a judge. And she was not happy.
For the record, Judge Connie L. Williford was neither ornery nor overly irritated. She was, however, on a mission to learn why last fall when 200 of her fellow Middle Georgians were sent summonses for jury duty, just 84 of them appeared.
As the explanations piled up, she occasionally sounded exasperated.
“I can’t have a police officer come every time I need to summon jurors. ... I want you to take your citizenship more seriously, OK?” Williford told one young man.
About a year ago, an informal nationwide survey of more than 200 judges found that more than half had noticed an uptick in the number of people shirking jury duty. Some cited out-of-date contact information for prospective jurors, who are contacted by mail.
The National Judicial College, which conducted the poll, reported that many more judges “blamed the trend on a real or perceived lack of consequences for not showing up. An equally large number said they see declining respect for the judiciary, the law, government, the responsibilities of citizenship or all of the above.”
Senior Judge Howard Z. Simms of Middle Georgia, who served as district attorney and, later, as chief judge in the Macon Judicial Circuit, said there are places around the state where, as he put it, “If you get 40% or 50% of the people showing up for the summonses you send out, you’re doing really well.”
One would think that in the information age it would be easy enough to let people know they have jury duty.
“Open your mail,” Simms said, “it’s not hard.”
But as Judge Williford soon learned, these days not everyone does. And it might be harder to even receive your mail these days, what with spotty delivery.
In Georgia, the names of prospective jurors come from voter registration rolls and, among other sources, the state’s Department of Driver Services and the Department of Public Health.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
One by one, those summoned by Williford in early January were led from the main courtroom to a smaller one with few seats. The judge was perched on a bench.
She informed those before her that one of the matters at hand back in mid-November, when they didn’t show up, had been the trial of a father accused in the beating death of his infant son.
Williford, a Newnan native who graduated from Mercer University’s law school, is among the region’s more affable judges. During trials, she is conversational with jurors during what is at times procedural drudgery.
On this day, as the excuses spilled forth for about two hours, she was at times skeptical but also understanding.
The first person called into the room, a man from neighboring Byron who works across town at the Blue Bird bus factory, said he never received a summons. “I don’t have no problem coming to jury duty. ... It’s a free day,” he said. “We get paid for it.”
Williford said she believed him. “That’s part of what we’re trying to figure out,” she said. “Is it a mail problem?”
The man didn’t know, but as the afternoon played out, more and more people said they had not received summonses. Or, as a couple of them said, they had received summonses but not been notified by family members that they had come until it was too late.
One man said he now lives in Macon, in a neighboring county, but hadn’t changed his address on his voter registration or his driver’s license. He said the summons went to his father’s house in Fort Valley, where he resided until sometime in 2023. But, he added, he still comes back to vote in Peach County.
“You can’t do that,” Williford said. “You can’t say, ‘I’m gonna pretend like I live here and vote here, but when they summons me to jury (duty) I’m gonna say, ‘I don’t live in Peach County.’ ... You see the problem with that?”
One woman, a retiree, admitted she flat out forgot about the summons, that she’d stuffed it in a drawer. The judge told her to be back for another trial week in April. “Put a sticky note on your refrigerator,” Williford said, “on your windshield.”
A truck driver who had missed showing up said he doesn’t check his mail much because of how much he’s out of town. But he said he would start checking it now.
“We’re trying to figure out how,” the judge told him, “we’re going to work our way around these changing times.”
Penalties for skipping jury duty include being charged with contempt of court, punishable by jail time or fines, but they’re rarely levied.
At Williford’s January meeting with jurors who hadn’t appeared in November, she was cordial with most and ordered them to report for jury duty this spring.
One fellow, a pharmaceutical delivery driver, seemed to think his job in, as he referred to it, the “health care” field, somehow automatically excused him. He had seen his summons envelope, he said, but didn’t open it.
“Why?” the judge asked.
“No reason,” he said.
“No reason?” the judge replied. “So what do you think would happen to the justice system if everybody who got a jury summons treated it the way you did?”
“It’s my first time,” the man, 24, said. “I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know that if a court summons you that you have to come? You thought it was optional? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’m not trying to put it that way,” the man said. He said he figured that because he was working that day he could skip court.
“We don’t just have unemployed people sitting on juries,” Williford said.
Next came a woman from Byron with a pair of toddlers in tow, a daughter and a son. The children had been well-behaved as they waited for their mother’s appearance.
Williford, noticing the kids, joked with the woman.
“You were going to make sure you weren’t going to jail,” the judge said.
The woman said she was a stay-at-home mom of two more children and is pregnant. She figured she’d be excused anyway but didn’t bother going through the process to approve her absence.
“What if one of your children were a victim of a heinous crime — would you want justice to be served?” the judge asked her.
“Definitely.”
“So what would we do if everybody kind of took the attitude that you took, that ‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’”
The mother mentioned her children, how that should excuse her. She was reminded of the form she could have filled out and returned to the court clerk.
When a man from Byron entered the room, he said he had no idea he’d been sent a summons to appear in November. It seemed the notice had been lost in a stack of mail he hadn’t bothered to look through.
“What we are finding,” the judge told him, “is so much junk mail comes now and most people do their stuff electronically. They don’t pay as much attention to their mail as they used to. But until the legislature changes the way we have to summons folks, we summons them by mail.”
A Fort Valley man who looked to be in his late 60s or older appeared genuinely concerned that he received no jury notice. He said he has had trouble getting his mail.
“If I’d have got it, I would have been here,” he said.
“You can’t be somewhere you don’t know to be,” the judge replied.
She also told more than half the day’s visitors to come back in mid-April for the trial week then, and to be there promptly at 1 p.m.
“I’m gonna be here sitting in my truck,” the Fort Valley man replied, “at 8 o’clock that morning.”
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