In Cuyahoga County, there’s one less reason to dread a jury duty summons showing up in the mailbox — a refurbished jury room.
The old room’s orange walls have been torn away. The creaky heating and cooling system is gone. That spotty Wi-Fi? Replaced. The crummy chairs? Also gone. And the better-off-if-you-avoid-them bathrooms have also been redone.
And, according to Administrative Judge Brendan Sheehan, the most-complained-about feature of the old room — insufficient outlets to plug in phones or use a laptop — has been addressed. Now, every chair has access to outlets.
“We bring people down here, we invite them to wait for their court case, so we now offer them free coffee. Free coffee and hot chocolate. Why not, right?” said Sheehan during a media tour of the room. “My hope is that after they get this lovely experience and the great coffee and hot chocolate, that people are begging to come back to jury duty.”
The room was last renovated 30 years ago. Filing fees paid to the court to initiate cases were used to pay for the upgrades, which started in the spring and were completed in December.
“We’ve modeled it after — if you have ever gone to the airport and you have one of those lounges at an airport — it's like a lounge at an airport where people can work while they're waiting for their flight,” Sheehan said.
The court moved to a “call-in” system for jury pools during the pandemic. Prospective jurors call before their day of service to find out whether they’ve been assigned a case. Between 200 and 300 jurors come in every week; previously, it was closer to 600.
The jury room moved to the convention center during the pandemic to enable social distancing, but that space is no longer available, said Sheehan. After that, the room moved to the Justice Center’s cafeteria during renovations.
Sheehan couldn’t hide his enthusiasm for the room’s transformation.
“When I walked in here as a young lawyer, it was an ugly room. It was a depressing room. It was not a place you really felt comfortable,” he said. “When I walked into it last week, I was mesmerized.”
