(Seguin) — If you receive a jury summons, don’t be surprised if you are directed to go to the Seguin Coliseum instead of the Guadalupe County Justice Center. The Seguin Coliseum was recently approved to serve as a centralized host site for jury panel selection.
The request was approved on Tuesday by the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court. Forwarding the request on behalf of the district courts was State District Judge Bill Old. Judge Old says the biggest impediment of moving forward post pandemic is conducting jury trials.
“We need under the guidelines from the Supreme Court and the office of Court Administration to have an area large enough to conduct the initial stages of what is known as Voir Dire. Voir dire is where we select jurors to sit on a jury panel. Typically, what will happen is a three stage process. We do qualifications. You have to qualify to sit on a jury in the state of Texas followed by exemptions. Those are excuses that the legislature allows to have people excuse themselves or be reset from jury duty and then finally, you have the third phase is where the attorneys question the prospective jurors to determine whether or not they are appropriate for that particular jury. Right now, our largest courtroom, Courtroom 203 can seat only using the modified guidelines from the CDC, 62 people. That is barely enough for most jury trials. It certainly is not big enough if we were to conduct a murder trial or sexual assault case,” said Old.
Old says by hosting the jury selection portion of the trial at the Coliseum, it will allow for a more efficient and safe way to gather large numbers of people.
“So what we’ve done and what propose is we are going to have a mass gathering of potential jurors in order to qualify them and let them claim their exemptions. We will then be picking panels of 62 and then directing them to come to the Justice Center on given days so that they can be selected for a particular jury. Our plan is to summon approximately 1,000 people and then hopefully, get four panels in the month of June of 62 each. I don’t know how many people are going to show up. I had a jury trial last week in Gonzales — 252 people were summoned. Approximately, 86 claimed their exemptions or were disqualified in advance — 48 showed up. So, that was 116 people missing. But, we need to have a large enough room. That is why the Coliseum has been selected as our potential place to do that because we can adequately space people out,” said Old.
State District Judge Bill Old
Old says having the extra available space will hopefully also allow for potential jurors to join the process when summoned.
In its approval to host the jury selection process at the Seguin Coliseum, Commissioners also publicly thanked the city of Seguin for its waving of all fees associated with its three day rental throughout the summer. Those applauding the city and its partnership was Commissioner Pct. 2 Drew Engelke.
“I saw the contract and I like to think of the silver lining in things so these are COVID related issues that we are having to deal with to find another venue out of the norm and so I reached out to Steve Parker, the city manager and in a nutshell, the city has agreed to waive the fees for this facility’s use for this mass jury panels that we need to do this summer. So, the contract that we have before us for the price of $1,800, the city manager has graciously offered to waive that for the county just enhancing our partnership that we have currently and going forward and again, stems back to an unusual situation so they are stepping up and helping us out. So, really thank you to the city of Seguin and we can move forward with this process,” said Engelke.
The dates to be utilized at the Coliseum include June 1, July 19 and Sept. 7.