Ben Johnson spent most

of the day Monday stuck

inside the Maricopa County

Superior Court complex

serving on a jury.

The 43-year-old Glendale

resident said he learned a

lot, but still saw it as an

inconvenience. What struck

him was that court officials

thanked the jurors for their

"willingness" to serve.

"Now 'willingness' and a

'summons' are two different

things to me," he said. "I

didn't feel like I had a

choice."

Johnson doesn't believe people should be required to

serve on juries. And he

definitely doesn't agree with Maricopa County Superior

Court's decision to form a

"Scofflaw Court" for those who ignore jury summons.

"As an American, one of the rights to fight for is the

choice to say, 'Yes, I want to

participate' or 'No, I don't,' " he said.

After a yearlong debate, Presiding Judge Colin Campbell

signed an order Monday

vowing to enforce jury summons for the first time,

saying, "We can't allow people to

ignore court orders."

Earlier this year, the Legislature designated a failure

to appear for jury service as a

Class 3 misdemeanor and raised the maximum penalty from

$100 to $500. Until

now, even the $100 penalty hadn't been enforced.

Campbell said the courts have seen a decline in the

number of people responding to

jury summonses over the years, and felt they had to act.

"It's disappointing we don't get a better response rate,

and I think it's

disconcerting," he said. "This needs to be addressed.

Sanctions are probably the

most drastic alternative, but I think we have to go

there."

The county's jury pool is formed every six months by

merging voter registration and

driver's license files, creating a master list of about

1.3 million prospective jurors. Of

those, the Office of the Jury Commissioner mailed out

about 600,000 summonses,

including those for Superior, justice, municipal, and

district courts, during fiscal

2001.

In some cases, people reply to their summons but don't

show up for jury duty. But

Superior Court officials said the larger problem comes

from those who don't

respond at all. They don't know if that's because the

people have moved or just

pitched the summons.

Three years ago, the court averaged 188 no-shows per

business day. Now, they're

up to about 315.

And it's not just a local problem.

"People get their notice for jury service, and it's easy

to get out of and you don't get

a representative jury," said Gretchen Schaefer, a

spokeswoman for the American

Tort Reform Association in Washington, D.C.

Association President Sherman Joyce said the declines

could be the result of several

factors, including the difficulty of tracking people in

large metropolitan areas and the

rising number of professional groups seeking exemptions.

Campbell, and the court's judicial executive committee,

said they're ready to enforce

that duty.