The Jury Selection Task Force commissioned by the state Supreme Court in 2019 following the New London case of State v. Holmes recently released a report that makes a number of suggestions for jury reform in Connecticut, meant to eradicate racial bias from the jury selection process.

The 51-page report recommends increasing the number of people eligible as jurors, making changes to the way jurors are summoned, implementing a new court rule meant to eliminate the exclusion of potential jurors based on their race or ethnicity, and adding instruction for jurors about implicit bias.

The task force recommends increasing the number of people eligible as jurors in three ways — by allowing legal residents who are not citizens to serve on juries, by eliminating the seven-year ban on jury service for convicted felons and by raising the age at which people can automatically opt out of jury service from 70 to 75 years old. This will widen the pool of prospective jurors and restore the right to serve to people who have been convicted of felonies but are no longer incarcerated.

The task force is recommending that juror questionnaires be more detailed, so there is more demographic information available during the jury summoning and selection processes.

Additionally, the report recommends a few changes to the way jurors are summoned. The task force recommends that the number of summons sent out to prospective jurors in a specific ZIP code should be determined not only by that area's population, but by the rate at which people summoned in that area typically respond to jury summonses. The task force also recommends that if a summons is determined to be undeliverable, another summons be sent out to someone in the same ZIP code.

The report also recommends people serving on juries be paid minimum wage for their service and have any travel or family care expenses reimbursed; a new rule aimed at eliminating the unfair exclusion of potential jurors based on race or ethnicity; and more information be provided on implicit bias to jurors in criminal cases.

The task force was created to study the issue of racial discrimination in jury selection and recommended changes after Evan Holmes appealed his 2013 conviction for the murder of Jorge Rosa, claiming that the prosecutor had acted with discrimination in keeping a Black man off the jury, denying him a fair trial. The jury selection in the case was the subject of discussion before the state Supreme Court in January 2019. Justice Richard A. Robinson, the state's first African American chief justice and an expert on implicit bias, sat on the case.

Would-be juror Winston Taylor of Norwich, a social worker who works with a New London church and is a supervisor with the Department of Social Services, was questioned during jury selection — called the voir dire process — by prosecutor Paul J. Narducci. Taylor admitted that based on his personal experience as a Black man, he felt that some people don’t receive a fair trial or may be disproportionately incarcerated based on race.

Narducci used a peremptory challenge to dismiss Taylor from the jury pool, fearing he might be biased against the prosecution. Taylor was not selected to serve on the 12-member jury that went on to find Holmes, a mixed-race man, guilty of murder.

The trial court judge found Narducci had legitimate reasons beyond race to dismiss Taylor, but the dismissal raised questions about implicit bias in the justice system, including the exclusion of people who have concerns about police and judicial bias.

The task force was created to review and recommend changes to remedy the negative impacts of implicit bias in the jury selection process in Connecticut. Earlier this month, their report was sent to Chief Justice Robinson, who called their recommendations “excellent and extensive.”

Narducci, appointed to his new role of state's attorney for the New London Judicial District on Thursday, said he has not yet had a chance to review the report.

In a statement, Robinson said he anticipates implementing many of the recommendations and believes “they will have a profound effect on our ability to ensure fair and impartial justice for all.”

He commended the task force members, including retired Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers, for their work on the report. “This was a heavy lift in a relatively short period of time — and, I might add, during a pandemic,” Robinson said. “The report they completed is nothing short of remarkable.”

In a phone call Friday, Taylor said he is happy the task force is studying and trying to remedy issues in the jury selection process that stem from implicit biases that many people don't even realize affect their actions. He said he thinks the task force’s priority should be implementing more mandatory implicit bias training, especially for attorneys, officers in the court and judges.

“You need to have some serious implicit bias training because you could be the best attorney, the best judge, yet because of unconscious biases, you could be impacting a population of people in a negative way,” Taylor said.

He said he was glad to learn that jurors also will receive more training. “It is of course important for the jurors to be educated, too, because there is a whole bunch of biases that could be in those individual people,” he said. “It’s excellent to be working with the jurors, giving them some guidelines and some mini trainings about implicit bias.”

Robinson said in mid-January that he had taken steps to start implementing some of the recommendations.

“Our hope is to make changes as quickly as we can,” Robinson said. “However, we also need to make sure that we take the time to do it right.”

t.hartz@theday.com