Court Opinion

ID: 9758937
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:56:30.112442+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:57.315144
License: Public Domain

MICHAEL A. WOLFF, Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I join in Judge Stith’s opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. I also join in Judge White’s dissenting opinion.
*859I write separately to suggest that the St. Louis city-county venue maneuvers, which have accounted for much of our case law on this subject, be ended by merging the jury pools in the city and county. If litigants were to get the same jury whether they are in the city or county, they would get juries more broadly representative of the St. Louis community, and the question of venue would be of much less importance.
Venue in Missouri is solely a function of statute, as the principal opinion points out. It is not a matter of convenience, but rather the choice of an appropriate forum. State ex rel. Public Service Commission v. Dally, 50 S.W.3d 774, 777 (Mo. banc 2001).
From an advocate’s perspective, venue in personal injury cases is all about jurors.1 The plaintiffs lawyer’s two-step maneuver after this case was filed in the city was designed to lay venue in the city of St. Louis.
The preponderance of anecdotal evidence is that jurors in the city of St. Louis are far more favorably disposed toward injured plaintiffs’ claims than are their counterparts in suburban St. Louis County or in most other counties in the state.2
Differences in the composition of juries from one county to another are commonly noted. Arm-chair psychologists and legitimate social scientists study the effects of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and other factors, including whether the prospective juror lives in a rural or urban area, and draw conclusions about those differences.3
The jury is the ultimate democratic institution, and its members reflect the values of their respective communities.
There should be no difference between the community represented by those selected for jury service in the city and in the county. Whether residents of the city or the county, St. Louisans are now, like it or not, part of the same community. When the current Missouri Constitution was adopted in 1945, the city had a population, as of the 1940 census, of 816,048, while the county’s population was 274,230. The county was still largely rural, with several distinct towns. It had been separated from the city for nearly 75 years.4
With the passage of 56 years since the 1945 Constitution, the distinctions have blurred. There are now, as of the 2000 census, 1,016,315 persons residing in the county, while the city’s 2000 census was 348,189, and continuing to decrease, although the rate of population loss may be slowing.5 St. Louis County is largely urban, and the boundaries between city and county are hard to discern without the aid of street signs. By the peculiar geography of the St. Louis area, many residents of *860the county live closer to downtown St. Louis than to Clayton. More than a few city residents live closer to downtown Clayton than to downtown St. Louis.
The city of St. Louis is recognized as a distinct entity in the Missouri Constitution; article VI, section 31. Visionaries may speak of the benefits of rejoining the city and county for governmental purposes, but governmental fragmentation may be a fact of life not likely to change in the near future. There are, after all, nearly 100 municipalities in the St. Louis city-county area, as well as hundreds of other entities of local government. For many people, that fragmented pattern of governance is functional in keeping governments small and highly localized.
But whatever the benefits and drawbacks to fragmented governance in this metropolitan area, they are wholly unrelated to issues of jury service. As to juries, the goal is a diverse cross-section widely representative of the community at large. To achieve this goal, the laws relating to juries should be changed to eliminate the distinction between city and county jurors by combining the jurors into a single jury pool.
The distinction between city jurors and county jurors has a tendency to skew the jury composition of those separate jurisdictions so as to be unrepresentative of the community at large. The population changes in the city and the county since 1945 give these separate jurisdictions jury pools that appear to be substantially segregated by race and socioeconomic status, even though the county’s population has become more diverse in recent years.
The clearest way to address the problem is to combine the jury pools so that jurors in both the city and county are selected from the same pool of eligible persons.
That would lead not only to a greater representation in the jury pool of the community as a whole, but would also ease the tremendously disproportionate burden carried by the citizens of St. Louis city who are called to jury service. In the year 1999 2000, 26,160 residents of the city appeared for jury service. There were 1,388 jury trial days.6
By stark contrast, St. Louis County, with a 2000 census population of 1,016,315, received service from about half the number of prospective jurors as did the city. There were 13,720 county residents who appeared for jury service. St. Louis County compiled 805 total jury trial days in the 1999-2000 fiscal year.
Civil cases in the city accounted for 733 total jury trial days of the 1,388 total, with 655 total jury trial days on criminal cases. In the county, 529 jury trial days were taken up by civil matters, and 276 jury trial days were spent on criminal cases.7
The 26,160 persons who appeared for jury service in the city of St. Louis in that year constituted approximately 10.7% of the city’s adult (21 and over) population of 242, 835. The age 21 is used because that is when citizens become eligible for jury service under section 494.425. To get that number of prospective jurors, 26,160, to *861appear in that year, 72,228 city residents were summoned — nearly 30 percent of the city’s 21-and-over population.
Again by contrast, the 13,720 St. Louis countians who appeared for jury service in that year constituted less than 2% of the county’s 21-and-over population of 722,-371.
Combining jury pools in the city and county appears to be a matter of statute for civil juries.8 As to the criminal case juries, a constitutional change may be needed.9
Changes in the law and in the Constitution are not easily achieved. The status quo is powerful. But the effort is worth making.10
The right of trial by jury — of 12 persons representing the community — is subject to attack.11 This Court has recently implemented changes in the jury system recommended by a Civil Jury Study Committee in order to make juries more effective and jurors’ service more accommodating and meaningful to those who serve.
In contrast to reforms that make jury service more effective and meaningful, the change suggested here is more fundamental and is directed to the viability of the jury trial system. If the jury system and number of cases stay about the same in the city of St. Louis, and the population continues to decrease,12 the right to trial by jury will be at risk. In order to *862get a sufficient number of qualified jurors, a much larger number needs to be summoned. In the city, 72,228 were summoned and 26,160 appeared. These numbers may indicate resistance to jury service — nearly two-thirds of those summoned in the city were excused, ineligible, or simply did not show up. St. Louis County summoned 58,800 and 13,720 appeared. The county’s relatively poorer attendance rate — over three-fourths did not appear — may simply reflect a system that more easily excuses prospective jurors than the jury system in the city.
Our jury system is precious. Though its roots are in the Common Law courts of England, its contemporary role is particularly American. It is a fundamental source of legitimacy for the judicial system and a powerful tool to educate the citizens of a democracy.13 The time and effort that citizens give to this duty ought to be fairly shared in the metropolitan area that includes St. Louis city and county. From the data recited here, it is quite clear that jury service may be disproportionately costly for some of our citizens who reside in the city of St. Louis.
More importantly, juries ought to be drawn from both city and county so that they may more accurately reflect the racial, ethnic, religious, economic, geographic diversity of the entire St. Louis community.14
Combining the jury pools of the city and county would eliminate the major reason for venue manipulation in those jurisdictions. Moreover, the privilege and burden of jury service would be more evenly distributed in the St. Louis community, and the right to trial by jury would be more easily preserved.

. Craig A. Adoor & Joseph J. Simeone, Law of Venue in Missouri, 32 St. Louis U. L.J. 639 (1988).

. In addition to the verdicts and settlements reported each week in the Missouri Lawyers Weekly, there are private subscription services that report verdicts from various venues in the state. See also State ex rel DePaul Health Center v. Mummert, 870 S.W.2d 820, 821 (Mo. banc 1994).

. See, e.g., Robert MacCoun, Inside the Black Box: What Empirical Research Tells Us About Decisionmaking by Civil Juries, in Verdict: Assessing the Civil Jury System 137 (Robert E. Litan ed., 1993).

. The constitutional recognition of the city first appears in the Missouri Constitution of 1875. The 1945 Missouri Constitution is used as the reference point here to highlight the dramatic population shifts that have occurred since Missouri most recently rewrote its Constitution 56 years ago.

. These data are from the United States Census Bureau.

. The population figures are from the United States Census Bureau. The data on jury service are from the Office of State Courts Administrator as reported by the respective jurisdictions.

. Crime is not isolated by the city-county line. Incidence of crime in certain sections of the city may account for a higher caseload of criminal jury trials in the city, but it is also possible that jury composition may affect the number of cases that defendants choose to have tried. Regardless of where crimes are reported to occur, residents of all parts of the community have an interest in fair disposition of the cases.

. Article V, section 5, relating to the powers of this Court, prohibits court rules that would "change substantive rights, or the law relating to ... juries,....” Article V, section 5. The suggested change presumably involves amendments of chapter 494, relating to juries.

. Article I, section 18(a) of the Missouri Constitution gives the accused in criminal cases the right to "a speedy public trial by an impartial jury of the county.” In criminal cases, that refers not to the county of the defendant’s residence, which is a reference point for venue in civil cases, but to the county where the crime or some portion of it was committed. Section 541.033, RSMo 2000. Missouri adopted constitutions, following constitutional conventions, in 1820, 1865, 1875, and 1945. These intervals, as well as the demographic, governmental and societal changes that have occurred since 1945, suggest that the state constitution may be due for another updating. However, it may be that Missouri in modern times avoids the constitutional convention as a means of updating the constitution. Piecemeal amendments have become quite common — there have been 237 constitutional amendments since the 1945 constitution.

. The peculiar divide in the St. Louis area does not occur across the state in the other major urban area, Jackson County. Though there are courthouses in Kansas City and in the city of Independence, all jurors are drawn from a countywide pool, which includes urban dwellers from. Kansas City, as well as suburbanites and those who may come from the rural outreaches of Jackson County. The jurors in Jackson County undoubtedly represent to a much greater degree the varied viewpoints of the larger community, rather than being segmented between inner city and suburbia.

. See, e.g., Mark Curriden, Power of 12, ABA Journal. August 2001, p. 36. The ABA article previews a symposium on the jury, produced as a collaboration of the Southern Methodist University Law Review and the Dallas Morning News. Articles of particular pertinence in the forthcoming issue include Victoria A. Farrar-Myers and Jason B. Myers, Echoes of the Founding: The Jury in Civil Cases as Conferrer of Legitimacy, 54 SMU L.Rev. (forthcoming 2001), and Tom M. Dees, III, Juries: On the Verge of Extinction? A Discussion of Jwy Reform, 54 SMU L.Rev. (forthcoming 2001).

. Missouri’s state demographer projects a St. Louis population of slightly less than 300,-000 in the year 2010, and 266,000 in the year 2020. Office of State Demographer, available at www.oa.state.mo.us/bp/plngrsr2.htm. The projected decreases in the city’s population may not necessarily mean decline. The population of the city may be smaller, but more affluent as less affluent residents continue to move to the county.

. In his 1835 classic, Democracy in America, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville described the central position of juries in our society in a way that remains true today, though both genders are today included. The jury, de Tocqueville said:
imbues all classes with a respect for the thing judged and with the notion of right. If these two elements be removed, the love of independence becomes a mere destructive passion. It teaches men to practice equity; every man learns to judge his neighbor as he would himself be judged. And this is especially true of the jury in civil causes; for while the number of persons who have reason to apprehend a criminal prosecution is small, everyone is liable to have a lawsuit. The jury teaches every man not to recoil before the responsibility of his own actions and impresses him with that manly confidence without which no political virtue can exist. It invests each person with a kind of magistracy; it makes them feel the duties which they are bound to discharge towards society and the part which they take in its government. By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 285 (Phillip Bradley trans. ed., 1994).

. See Barbara Allen Babcock, Juty Service and Community Representation, in Verdict: Assessing The Civil Jury System, supra note 4, at 460 et seq.