A ‘glitch’ left young people off jury rolls

“It is a vital government function that isn’t that hard to get right, so it’s at least a bit surprising to see errors today that you might think had been eliminated 20 years ago,” said David N. Rosen, a lawyer who was involved in a jury selection debacle in the early 1990s in Connecticut. The Indiana Supreme Court in 2002 overturned a death sentence after “a flawed program” excluded nearly one-third of a county’s jury pool. With millions of names in the mix, a decentralized legal system, and harried judges, clerks and lawyers trying to stem backlogs, researchers and court officials said jury database errors can happen at plenty of points along the way.

Source: www.nytimes.com