What happens when Covid comes to Monterey County Superior Court?

Just a few weeks into the pandemic, a group of local defense attorneys began wondering how the Monterey County Superior Court system planned to keep people who had business with the court safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. By people who had business with the court, I’m referring not only to defendants and victims or litigants, but clerks and bailiffs, attorneys, judges, witnesses and juries. On a busy day, the Salinas courthouse has hundreds and maybe even a thousand people moving in and out.

Jury trials resumed in June after the initial pandemic shutdown, and for any given trial, hundreds of jurors are often called so attorneys have a sufficient number of potentials from which to choose. On one day, about six weeks ago, the line of jurors waiting to be called into the Salinas courthouse extended from the doors down the government plaza walkway to the County Administration Building, and they were out there for hours.

Why talk about Covid and the courts right now? Because on Dec. 8, I received an email from a defense attorney asking me if I was aware that an attorney involved in a jury trial that I had been covering (see story, p. 12) that ended earlier that day had tested positive for Covid.

When I returned to the courtroom after the jury reached a verdict, the email made sense: the prosecutors who were there at the beginning of the trial were no longer there.

I thought back to the opening day and how the trial flowed. There were plexiglass barriers in place keeping the parties separated from each other (although they don’t extend all the way to the ceiling). There’s hand sanitizer available throughout the building. Jurors and people in the audience were socially distanced on wooden benches, told to sit only in spaces marked with orange painters’ tape.

And a courtroom is a windowless chamber with not great airflow. In that particular courtroom, everyone was masked for the duration, although witnesses were asked if they would mind removing their masks to make it easier for the court reporter to hear as she takes the record. Only one witness – the emergency room doctor who treated the victim for the injuries he suffered in the attack – refused to unmask, and after his testimony was over, he couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. In some other courtrooms – even now, as cases are accelerating, ICU beds are filling and our local doctors are begging people to do whatever they can to slow the spread – some (not all) judges don’t wear masks on the bench.

I asked the Court Administrative Officer how they planned to tell people who had been there to observe. Here’s Chris Ruhl’s answer: “The court has a well-established protocol and procedure for following up on such positive tests, that we have worked out with the County Health Department. In this case, since the positive test was not a court employee, their employer will also have to be engaged in this process. The process will also involve the Health Department in assessing which persons, if any, who were in the courtroom (or courthouse) during the trial may have been considered a ‘close contact’ and as such are advised to test and/or quarantine.”

And then I asked for and received a transcript of the hearing to find out if jurors were told they had just spent a few days in a windowless room with someone who had tested positive for the virus.

Here’s what Judge Andrew Liu told jurors, before the verdict was read: “There is something that I feel compelled to tell you that I didn’t know before we got on the record today.

“Right at about 11:00 today, I was notified that one of the parties in the case who was here for the majority of the case did test positive for Covid… I felt personally that I couldn’t let it go and that you needed to be told. I believe that policy dictates that you don’t have to be told, but I felt that was important to let you know.”

The line “I believe that policy dictates that you don’t have to be told, but… ” is the one I find most startling.

I had a choice to be in that courtroom. Jurors, once they’re chosen, don’t have a choice. If something’s happened in the course of their service that could impact their health – or that of their families – they deserve to know it. This time, they do.

Mary Duan writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com