After months of delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, jury trials will soon resume in local courts, beginning with one of the defendants charged in the 2016 murder of a single mother in Mobile.
The 13th Judicial Circuit of Mobile County closed down its courtrooms entirely in March in response to the emergence of the area’s first COVID-19 cases, and while courts have since reopened for limited in-person proceedings, the Alabama Supreme Court has not authorized full jury trials to resume anywhere in the state until the week of Sept. 14 at the earliest. Courts in Mobile are now planning to start that day.
According to Presiding Circuit Judge Michael Youngpeter, court officials began sending out the first summons to potential jurors last week and they should have arrived or will be arriving soon. From where they report for jury duty, to how they’re screened and where they sit, the process for jurors will certainly be different as trials slowly begin to resume in the coming weeks.
“Prior to COVID, when we sent out jury summonses, we would instruct people to report to the courthouse to our general assembly room,” Youngpeter said. “It’s a big room, but not as big as you think when we’re putting people six feet apart. We can normally fit about 300 people in there, which would be enough to set juries throughout the week. With social distancing, we can only fit about 50 people.”
Realizing they’d need more space, court officials reached an agreement with the city of Mobile earlier this year to use the Expo Hall at the Mobile Civic Center and also took advantage of platforms created by the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts that allows jurors to be prequalified remotely.
The new process will mark the first occasion an online jury qualification process has been used in Alabama courts. Individuals receiving a summons for jury duty will be instructed to log onto a dedicated juror website to complete a short questionnaire.
The website may be accessed by computer or on a smartphone and will allow potential jurors to complete a short questionnaire to be qualified as a juror. As part of the screening process, jurors will also be asked about any potential exposure to COVID-19 they may have had.
According to Youngpeter, the remote process allows courts to limit the number of people interacting during the early stages of jury selection and allows jurors at a heightened risk of complications from COVID-19 due to age or an underlying medical condition request to have their service deferred.
The Civic Center, which is typically where most jurors park, will be used to sort jurors and to provide an opportunity for jurors without access to the internet to go through the same screening in person. As for voir dire — the process of seating the final jurors and alternates — Youngpeter said it would take place in either the ceremonial courtroom or the jurors’ general assembly areas.
“We’ve scheduled things so that only four judges will actually be striking jurors on any given week, but for the starting week of Sept. 14, we’re actually scaling that back to just one case,” Youngpeter said. “Jefferson County is trying one case, Montgomery is trying one case and Madison County has opted not to attempt to hold any jury trials until at least mid-October. What we’re doing is pretty much in line with other jurisdictions in Alabama that have had COVID-19 issues.”
During actual court proceedings, jurors won’t be seated in the jury box but will instead sit in the gallery where the audience typically would so social distancing can be maintained. A camera feed focused on the witness stand will also be broadcasting to closed-circuit televisions set up in the gallery for jurors.
Spectators from the public and media likely won’t be able to sit in the actual courtroom during trials, but Youngpeter said the court staff will be setting up separate locations — either in empty courtrooms or the general assembly room — for the public to watch live video of trials.
In some cases, masks will be required, though witnesses will be required to take their masks off while testifying on the stand. The witnesses’ stand and the judge’s bench will be separated by plexiglass, and enhanced sanitizing, temperature screenings and other measures will be in effect.
“A lot of this was paid for originally by the county, but we’ve gotten reimbursed from the state court system’s portion of the federal funds sent for COVID-19 related matters,” Youngpeter said. “A $10 million cut out of those funds went to state courts, and that’s ultimately what is paying for a lot of this.”
When trials resume in a little more than three weeks, Youngpeter will preside over the first — a felony murder trial against 20-year-old Iseral Bernard Hall.
Hall was one of two defendants charged in the 2016 murder of Deluana Anderson Powell, the 24-year-old mother who was shot and killed during an attempted carjacking while on her way to work in 2016. Only 16 at the time, Hall was charged with felony murder and is being tried as an adult.
In previous court hearings, investigators indicated Hall’s co-defendant, Antonio Lang, actually fired the shots that killed Powell, but Hall participated in a plan to steal her car. Lang’s charges of capital murder, robbery and carrying a pistol without a permit will be tried separately.
Asked about the timing of Hall’s trial, Youngpeter said it made sense as the first post-COVID-19 trial because it was already on his docket and it was a case that needed to move forward.
“I wanted to preside over the first case because it will kind of be a way to test these new procedures. I wouldn’t ask another judge to do something that I wouldn’t,” he said. “As for the nature of the case, I felt we owed it to the jury not to have them come down here to hear a dog bite case or something like that.”
While trials are set to resume, they will still be moving forward more slowly than usual, and some of the more high-profile capital murder trials won’t be moving forward at all initially.
As Lagniappe reported, Youngpeter and District Attorney Ashley Rich previously reached an agreement to delay at least 12 capital murder trials, including five seeking the death penalty, until at least 2021, because of challenges created by the ongoing pandemic.
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