Ensuring Jury Pool Diversity with Innovative Form and Communication Design

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), in partnership with the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), Disability Belongs and Ideas42, seek to enhance the diversity of juries by increasing participation by marginalized and underrepresented communities. The project, Ensuring Jury Pool Diversity with Innovative Form and Communication Design, will use behavioral science to inform the re-design of jury summons to enhance their understandability and accessibility, coupling the new design with intentional and informed outreach prior to jury service to increase engagement and participation by historically underrepresented communities. The project begins by working with the Arizona courts to develop and pilot test several different jury service forms and notification practices, developed through the application of behavioral science, universal design, and plain language principles. The redesigned forms will be randomly distributed to 1,000 prospective jurors in each of the 6 sites, with the resulting rates of response and appearance in court compared to those receiving the existing forms. Analysis of data from the pilot sites will be used, along with the expertise of the various project team members, to inform the development of a model practices guide.

Thereafter, the project will host three regional implementation workshops. Each workshop will accommodate up to 20 teams of 6 people, which feature a mix of practitioners and community members. In the workshops, teams will be educated on behavior science, universal design, and plain language principles, work with subject matter experts to evaluate and redesign their forms and notification practices, and develop implementation plans to disseminate the new forms and collect data on their efficacy in increasing response rates and improving jury diversity. Throughout the process, the project will also create and disseminate an array of educational resources to build the court community's competence surrounding behavioral science and accessibility practices. NCSC will serve as the research partner for this project with Disability Belongs and ideas42, lending subject matter expertise in the areas of universal design, plain language, and behavioral science. NACDL will serve as the project manager.