The country’s state and federal courts responded quickly to the coronavirus pandemic, adapting courts to conduct trials and finding the public ready to serve as a juror, court president John Roberts said on Thursday in his annual year-end message to the judiciary .
“Judges across the country report that, where jury trials have resumed, responses to jury calls have met or exceeded their high hopes for the public’s willingness to participate in the legal system during these very challenging times,” said Roberts.
The pandemic forced courts across the country to close in March, but in April, Roberts said, judges “were directing critical court functions in their home offices – or at kitchen tables” and were learning “quickly or at least eventually” to use audio and video conferencing tools.
The United States Supreme Court was among the adopters, canceling court sessions in the spring and instead listening to oral arguments at conference calls for the first time, a practice that continued when the court’s new term began in October.
To accommodate the jury’s judgments, the courts of first instance reconfigured the spaces, reusing large rooms to maintain social distance and installing Plexiglas to keep participants physically separate. Judges in Michigan and Florida held drive-through naturalization ceremonies, and courts in Iowa and Minnesota shifted their ceremonies to outdoors, he said.
Ordinary civil suits fell 10 percent in the year, and 25 percent less defendants were charged with immigration crimes “largely in response to a 70 percent reduction in defendants accused of wrongful entry”, said his report.
Robert noted some of the history of the superior court’s responses to the outbreaks, saying that America’s first Supreme Court president, John Jay, had to suspend the young Philadelphia Supreme Court in 1793 due to the yellow fever epidemic that killed 5,000 of the 50,000 city dwellers. “President Washington himself fell ill with a serious flu case” three years earlier, the report said.
Supreme Court sessions were again canceled in 1918 during the Spanish flu outbreak, the last time the court’s work was interrupted until the Covid-19 pandemic.
