There is a longstanding suspicion among community leaders, attorneys, and defendants that minorities are not adequately represented in county jury pools - the initial draw of candidates for jury service.

To test that hypothesis, attorneys in the Public Defender's Office - in 2003 and 2005 - counted the number of blacks in the jury pools in a total of 61 felony trials. The office turned the figures over to an RIT statistics professor, and he estimated that since blacks over 20 years of age make up around 12.3 percent of the county population, that they should have made up a similar percentage of the jury pools. Instead, they made up about 6.6 percent of the sampled pools.

The Public Defender's Office used that data to make appeals in several cases - the most recent was in 2007.

"Ultimately, the local court judges disagreed with us," says Public Defender Tim Donaher, who worked in the office's appeals bureau at the time. "There's no real other data that is available because of the fact that they do not keep track of it at the commissioner of jurors."

The office's efforts underscore this point: minorities probably are underrepresented on Monroe County juries, but good luck proving it. The data developed by the Public Defender's Office is the only effort that has been expended to study the issue. And while it's unclear exactly why there's been resistance to researching the matter, it is worth noting that if the jury system were found to be flawed, it could have significant repercussions for the local courts - including an influx of appeals.

So why does it matter if minorities are underrepresented in jury pools?

"Juries are really the voice of the community in the justice system," Donaher says.

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to a jury trial. And over the years, the courts have ruled that the jury pool should reflect the make up of the community.

"The problem that we're seeing is that most of the persons who are on trial happen to be persons of color," says the Rev. Marlowe Washington, pastor at Baber A.M.E. Church. "But those who make the decision are folks who are members of the majority community, and we don't think that's a fair representation."

Washington's church and the Public Defender's Office recently held a forum dealing with minority representation on juries.

Diverse jury pools bolster public confidence in the justice system, says District Attorney Mike Green.

"Everything we do is premised on the public confidence in the system," he says.

Minorities could be underrepresented for a variety of reasons. They tend to move more, so jury questionnaires may be less likely to reach them, Donaher says. Or they may be excused in higher numbers for things like economic hardship. But nobody's sure exactly why they are underrepresented. Members of the legal community, however, say they don't think that it's done intentionally.

At one time, the state did collect data on jurors' races, but that stopped, Donaher says, because the data was being used for discriminatory purposes: to keep people off juries.

As a result, no one can now say definitively that minorities are underrepresented, says Mike Wolford, an attorney in private practice and a former president of the Monroe County Bar Association.

In 2005, the Bar Association, under Wolford's leadership, tried to change that. The group held town meetings and a general consensus emerged that non-whites were underrepresented in the jury pool. So that year, the organization started organizing a study of the pools to "verify the extent to which underrepresentation existed," Wolford says.

Locally, there was a lot of support for the study. But the Bar Association was unable to get the approval of state court administrators -needed to perform the study - so the initiative died out.

But Wolford and other members of the Bar are pushing the study idea again. And once again they've got solid local support and are waiting on the approval of state court system administrators.

"The study will be able to demonstrate, once and for all, is there or is there not underrepresentation," Wolford says. "And then the second issue is, all right, what are you going to do about it? And that becomes a little more tricky."

That's why the church hosted its forum, Washington says. Washington says that he wants to see dialogue and solutions and, while he's leery of studies, he'll says that he'll support one that produces a tangible action plan.

"It's going to have to take some real strong, savvy, and innovative ideas to up the pool," he says. 

In the past, members of the Bar Association have tried to get members of the minority community to volunteer for jury service, and Commissioner of Jurors Charles Perraud did agree to call in those who registered, Wolford says. But Wolford says that he isn't sure how that worked out and Perraud could not be reached for comment on this story.

"What more can you do at this stage without some study to verify the underrepresentation?" Wolford says.

Public Defender Donaher says that he thinks that the commissioner of jurors' office may just need to compensate for unreturned questionnaires.

"Our argument has always been that if you know you need to boost the number of minorities in the jury pool, and you know that a lot of minorities live in certain ZIP codes, then oversample those ZIP codes," he says.