Allegheny County court error causes postponement of jury trials

An administrative error in the criminal division of Allegheny County Common Pleas Court means that no potential jurors received summonses this week, leading to the postponement of multiple jury trials and frustration among prosecutors and the defense bar.

The error didn’t come to light until Friday — leading into a long, holiday weekend.

“We all feel terrible for the people whose lives were affected by the mistake,” said Administrative Judge Jill E. Rangos.

The failure to send the summonses at least seven weeks ago, she said, was the result of human error.

Rangos said the error was identified when another employee planning for Tuesday’s court session discovered it.

Initially, Rangos said, it appeared that the mistake would impact both this week and next, but the jury office was able to scramble on Friday to get summonses printed and mailed out for next week before the end of the day.

On Tuesday, Rangos said the jury office had already received enough completed juror questionnaires — they can be filled out online — that they expect to have enough potential jurors for next week.

Ultimately, only three days were impacted, the judge said, because jurors would not be selected on Friday of this week because of scheduled pretrial conferences.

There were 10 cases listed for jury trials on this week’s calendar.

Defense attorney Lee Rothman expected to have one of those — a homicide case that is now more than three years old.

Tomichael Sherrell, 22, is accused in the April 10, 2019, fatal shooting of Bradley Lucier in Stowe during a robbery. Sherrell has been in custody since April 13, 2019.

On Monday, Rothman addressed Judge Thomas E. Flaherty about the juror summons mistake and the ripple effect it has on all the participants in the criminal justice system — including his client’s family that attended the hearing, witnesses and the victim’s family.

Rothman didn’t learn that his case was delayed until 3:30 p.m. Friday — after he’d already spent much of the past two weeks preparing for trial and planned to work through the weekend.

“It’s time consuming and arduous, and for it all to go away simply because of an administrative error with no notice is really quite frustrating,” Rothman said.

He said it’s likely the mistake will impact hundreds, if not thousands, of people, including other defendants whose cases in the future will have to be rescheduled to accommodate the new trial dates, including in jurisdictions outside of Allegheny County.

“This is certainly not fair to my client, but also to a variety of other people who are incarcerated,” Rothman said. “That jury room is empty, and we cannot do our job today.”

Rangos said this has never happened during her 20 years in the system.

”We’ve had a hiccup and went backward, looked into it to find where we put in a fail-safe,” she said. “We already have taken steps to ensure it can’t happen again.”