Court officials weigh in on impact of ever-expanding would-be jurors

julia.reischel@exhibitAnews.com

It is the first day of a trial in Courtroom 22 of the Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston’s Seaport District, and court officials are making last-minute preparations for jury selection.

Outside, meanwhile, prospective jurors mill about patiently, waiting to file into the courtroom where they will take their places on colonial-style wooden benches while the lawyers pick and choose whom they want to sit on the jury. 

The courthouse, opened a decade ago, features state-of-the-art architecture. Its curvaceous glass façade and similarly shaped corridors overlooking Boston Harbor were designed to create a feeling of openness and a connection to the city beyond — a reflection of the principle that justice is for everyone.

Despite their attention to accessibility, the designers of the courthouse’s interior spaces, however, apparently did not factor into their plans Americans’ widening waistlines. These cramped quarters are evident when a court staffer turns to the reporters near the door to Courtroom 22 and explains that getting the 100 potential jurors seated comfortably in the wooden rows of benches used for jury selection will not be easy.

“People are bigger than they used to be,” the staffer says, looking harassed. And indeed, when the more than 100 potential jurors file in, it is difficult to see how they could follow the instruction to sit five to a bench. As the would-be jurors squeeze uncomfortably past each other and wedge themselves into their seats, it is painful to imagine that they will have to sit there for hours as the lawyers and judges address them. 

Fitting five jurors to a bench works only if jurors are “your average weight,” says Zita Lovett, the clerk for Courtroom 22, who routinely has to maneuver them into the approximately 16 wooden benches that line the room. “If they’re a little bit bigger, [only] four” jurors can fit, she says.

‘Overweight and obese’

Whether jurors in the courts of Massachusetts are fatter than they used to be is difficult to prove because local jury administrators do not keep track of the body sizes of prospective jurors.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have records of that,” Pamela Wood, the state’s jury commissioner, says, slightly aghast at being asked the question. 

The jury administrator does collect other demographic information. Racial representation on a jury is considered so important, Wood notes, that jury summons cards include a special message telling jurors that they are required by law to state their race.

A bill that would outlaw discrimination based on height and weight was proposed in the Legislature, but even its sponsor, Rep. Byron Rushing, isn’t sure it will become law.

According to Wood, there currently is no need for jury administrators to track a juror’s height, weight or body mass index.

And yet, the fact that Americans are becoming larger is one of the most important demographic challenges the nation faces, say U.S. health officials. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 34 percent of adults age 20 and older are obese, up from 15 percent in 1980.

Increasingly obese Americans suggest that jurors drawn from the citizenry at large are heavier as well, says Paula Hannaford-Agor, director of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, Va.

“I have not heard from the jury people that I’ve worked with that this is a major problem,” she says. “But it’s indisputable, when you start looking at the public health statistics, that the population is overweight and obese. Given that jurors are selected randomly from the adult population, it’s likely that they are, too.”

Hannaford-Agor suspects that courthouse designers have yet to figure fatter jurors into their building plans.

“They probably have not caught up to health trends of this,” she says. “I’d be amazed if courts are thinking about weight ratio and wider seats for jurors.”

According to Don Hardenbergh, a courthouse design consultant based in Virginia, Hannaford-Agor may be right. He says that courthouse architecture has barely caught up with disability requirements and shows no signs of awareness of the fact that jurors, like other Americans, might be getting larger.

In the business community, the need for expanded seating seems more widely recognized, Hardenbergh suggests.

“There are standards on office furniture and chairs and seating furniture and how much space you allow for a person’s rear end,” he says.

‘Real-people’ tests

Henry N. Cobb, the New York-based architect who designed the Moakley courthouse, says that while the benches were custom-designed for the courtrooms and were extensively tested using the contours of test subjects, he did not specifically have fatter people in mind.

“We had mock-ups made, and they were tested with real people, but I don’t think they were 300-pound people,” Cobb says. “But they were not small people,” he adds

Still, the architect insists that the long benches in the Moakley building are unintentionally well designed for a fattening American population.

“The benches are certainly suitable for very large people,” Cobb contends. “If they’re wider than they used to be, they’re going to hold fewer people [if the occupants are of large sizes]. They’re not constraining, not as if you had individual chairs. That’s the way courthouse benches have traditionally been made, and it seems to me like a good idea.”

Unfortunately, Cobb’s benches at the Moakley courthouse have arms on the ends, which put some limits on their flexibility. Plump jurors cannot spill over the edges into the aisles, he points out.

If Americans continue to tip the scales at ever-higher levels, architects following in Cobb’s footsteps may have to consider the weight and size of the average juror, if only to make everybody in the courthouse more comfortable. {EXA}