From Shutdown to Stand for Justice: Modernizing Jury Service in Harris County (Part 1)
Under District Clerk Marilyn Burgess, Harris County has made a myriad of improvements to make serving on a jury more fair, diverse, and accessible. This is part one of how.
Chapter I: Why Jury Service Had to Change
For most people in Harris County, jury duty is the closest they will ever get to the inside of a courtroom. For years, the our system asked a lot from Harris County’s residents without giving much back. Historically jury participation has been low nationally with some data suggesting 20%, and most of the time the people who did show up did not reflect the county they were being asked to judge.
Although demographic data for residents who are eligible to serve can be tricky to pinpoint, the gaps we can see shed light on a real issue and they translate into real trials where the jury box does not look like the community in the gallery. Low pay for jurors, logistical hurdles, and a system that relied heavily on paper notices made it harder for working families, caregivers, and people in under‑resourced neighborhoods to say yes when a summons arrived. At the same time, public attention tended to focus on negative headlines or high‑profile cases, not the everyday work of summoning jurors, keeping courts open, and making sure everyone, from victims to defendants, had access to a fair trial.
When Marilyn Burgess took office as Harris County District Clerk in 2019, she made it a priority to modernize the way the county calls and supports jurors. Her goal was straightforward but ambitious: make jury service more convenient and more equitable so that more residents could afford to serve and more juries would reflect the county they represent. That meant using technology to communicate better, improving the experience once people arrived at the Jury Assembly Building, and working with state and local leaders to raise jury pay for the first time in decades.
Today, as she serves her final term and prepares to leave office in 2026, Burgess points to jury service as one of the clearest examples of how modernization can strengthen trust in the justice system. The work began well before the pandemic—but it was the unprecedented disruptions of 2020 that tested whether the District Clerk’s Office could keep the promise of a jury trial alive when almost everything else shut down.
Chapter II: Crisis and Continuity: Navigating COVID‑19
In March 2020, COVID‑19 transformed jury service from a routine civic duty into a public health challenge. A March 19 order from District Courts Administration suspended jury service, and county leaders moved quickly to limit gatherings in county buildings to ten people or fewer. Within days, the Harris County District Clerk’s Office closed its counters to the public in order to help slow the spread of the virus.
Shutting the doors did not mean shutting down the courts. “Almost all of our services are available online, and the public will be able to call and email our offices as well,” Clerk Burgess said as the office announced the suspension of in‑person services. She noted that the District Clerk’s Office reduced to 16% onsite staff and issued 185 computers so employees could work remotely from home, ensuring that e‑Filing, e‑Issuance, online payments, and records access remained available. For jurors, the message was clear: if you had a summons through the end of March, you did not need to appear or reschedule while the courts reassessed next steps.
Behind the scenes, Clerk Burgess and her team turned immediately to the question that would define the next phase of the pandemic: how to restart jury trials safely so the justice system would not grind to a halt? Working with judges, county engineers, public health officials, and the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation, the District Clerk’s Office helped develop a plan to resume jury calls at the NRG Arena, where there was room to space out hundreds of chairs and continuously sanitize the facility. Grand jury calls resumed at NRG on July 6, 2020, and petit jury calls followed on August 24.
By April 2021, Harris County had seated its 100th jury panel at NRG Arena. The Honorable Judge Hazel B. Jones of the 174th Criminal District Court presided over that landmark panel, and partner judges publicly thanked the District Clerk’s Office for making the process as safe as possible.
“The district courts have been working side by side with the District Clerk’s Office to ensure that the jury selection process is as safe as we can possibly make it,” said then Administrative Judge Robert Schaffer.
Judge Kristen Hawkins, who chaired the Board of Harris County District Judges at the time, praised the “countless hours” spent by county agencies and staff to seat 100 in‑person juries “during a global pandemic.”
Those months at NRG also became a proving ground for modernization. The District Clerk’s IT team deployed the first phase of e‑Juror, a new system that allowed summoned residents to pre‑register for jury service online, claim COVID‑19 concerns, and receive email and text reminders about their day of service. The ability to predict how many jurors would actually show up (and cancel or reschedule when cases settled late) became essential to operating safely during the pandemic and laid the groundwork for a more responsive jury system going forward.
As the county moved from the emergency phase of COVID‑19, District Clerk Marilyn Burgess began expanding community outreach beyond billboards and press releases. The District Clerk’s Office increased tours for high schools and presentations at college campuses to show how the courts work from the inside and what it means to serve on a jury. Clerk Burgess and members of her outreach team also gave presentations in different regions of Harris County explaining why answering a summons is a key part of giving neighbors a fair trial. These conversations ended with a simple message: the right to a jury trial still depends on ordinary people showing up.
The lessons from NRG Arena and those outreach efforts shaped the next wave of reforms: modern electronic summoning, better communication before and after a summons, and a renewed push to make jury service financially realistic for more Harris County residents.