Jury Facilities ‘Worst in County’

The air is stale, the carpet stained, the quarters cramped and the furniture strictly Los Angeles County issue.

Comfort is a frill in the Torrance courthouse’s jury assembly room, a second home each year for thousands of jurors.

“It’s a dump,” Steve Schriekenof Carson said Monday, on the first day of his minimum 10-day service. “For someone to be here for 10 days. . . . The $5 a day (jury pay) you can keep, but at least it should be comfortable.”

Courthouse officials are sympathetic to complaints. Jurors tell them regularly that they don’t enjoy their time in the basement of the five-story Maple Avenue courthouse.

“We have the worst facilities in the (county) system,” concedes Lerol White, the courthouse’s jury coordinator.

Officials said they hope to alleviate the problem temporarily by moving the jury room to more spacious quarters in a one-story annex building behind the main courthouse. But that will mean moving the county Probation Department and the South Bay Municipal Court’s civil, small claims and juvenile traffic divisions out of the annex and into rented space in another building.

A proposal for moving the jury room and the other facilities should be submitted to the county within two months, said South Bay Municipal Court administrator Christopher Crawford.

In the meantime, jurors make do.

There are not enough chairs to accommodate everyone when as many as 200 jurors are called on a Monday morning to serve the Municipal Court and the Torrance Superior Court. Some are left standing.

Jurors spend much of their time waiting in the basement gathering area before they are called into one of the building’s 19 courtrooms.

There is only one bathroom in the basement. It is just off a boiler room and is designated for men only.

Women had a bathroom in the basement, but it had to be closed this year to ensure security in an adjacent room where Municipal Court employees count cash, White said.

Recent juror Ula Roberts complained about the problem to court officials. “This is discrimination against women,” she said in an interview. “I am talking about basic needs!”

After complaints from Roberts and other jurors, the court agreed to open the basement bathroom, on request, to women.

In an added effort the ease the problem, first-floor bathrooms that had been open to the public have now been fitted with locks and keys provided only to jurors.

But jurors still complain about other problems: The air conditioning provides little relief in the overcrowded jury room. There are not enough desks for those who want to work while they’re waiting. And smokers are relegated to a hallway.

Several jurors said this week that the court employees have been attentive to their problems. Coordinator White permits jurors to leave the basement and sit in on trials, to ease the boredom a little.

And White uses a sharp sense of humor to disarm the disgruntled.

“We tell them, ‘You’re suffering through 10 days,’ ” White said. “ ‘But we’re here for a lifetime.’ ”