Nov 13, 2014 2 min read

“This is a court matter,” Washington County Commissioner Larry Maggi told the Observer-Reporter last week, adding, “The only responsibility we have is funding the courts. It’s a strange relationship.”

What Maggi either overlooked or the commissioners never fully understood is that “we the people” had watchdogs to protect us in the judicial branch of our local government, but he, along with fellow commissioners Diana Irey-Vaughan and Harlan Shober, voted to stop having elected jury commissioners. They felt a computer could handle that task, so good luck having a fair trial by jury, since Pennsylvania no longer has what I would call a uniform judicial system across the state.

So let me try to understand what is happening now to our right to a fair trial by our peers: Washington County’s president judge, Debbie O’Dell Seneca, is being relieved of all her administrative duties, but she is remaining as president judge; our lawmakers in Harrisburg twice had to rewrite the law allowing county commissioners to toss aside our elected jury commissioners at their whim, and the law as they left it now has the president judge as the lone member of the jury commission. The president judge can only appoint another judge to temporarily fill the position to oversee jury pool selection.

The law is very specific and does not state that the duties of overseeing our jury selection process could be turned over by the president judge to a court administrator. Nor did the law state an appointed interim administrative judge could perform these duties.

So who is now supposedly protecting our rights to a fair pool of jurors in Washington County?

With all the troubles our county judicial branch has been experiencing lately, elected jury commissioners should be reinstated in Washington County to serve as our watchdogs, guaranteeing us untainted jury pool selections for fair trials.

Rebecca L. Simpson

Washington