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Abstract

This Article will analyze the comprehensive demographic jury data reforms adopted by the Nebraska Supreme Court through new Court Rules and a new Juror Qualification Form (“Questionnaire”) promulgated October 2024 (“January 2026 Reforms”) and effective January 1, 2026. The Court has embraced major reforms that are cause for optimism that the Court will continue the journey to reinvigorate the guarantee that juries be drawn from a fair cross-section of the community served by the trial court as required by the Sixth Amendment and the Nebraska Jury Selection Act of 1979 (“NJSA”).

The full significance of these reforms may not be apparent upon first reading but will come into focus upon examination of both the longforgotten legislative history of the NJSA and the legislative history of the 2024 Rulemaking Proceedings that concluded with the Court’s adoption of the January 2026 Reforms. The extensive dialogue the Court System had with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Iowa-Nebraska State Conference (“NAACP”) was central to the Reforms. It was NAACP research and advocacy that caused the Court to revisit its implementation of the fair cross-section right in the Nebraska Court System and to acknowledge both that it had failed to collect, analyze, and monitor jury data for at least a dozen years and had failed to make available anonymized, aggregate demographic jury data to defendants and their counsel for twenty years. Such aggregate demographic juror data is the only way to determine whether the jury pools and jury panels of each of Nebraska’s ninety-three counties are in compliance with the Sixth Amendment and NJSA statutory fair crosssection guarantee that has long been central to the jury trial protection afforded defendants in our democracy.

The disarray of the Court System’s jury data operation—its processes and procedures—for a dozen years and the systemic twenty-year denial of defendants’ and their counsel’s access to anonymized, aggregate demographic jury data have meant that the constitutional and NJSA statutory guarantee of an “impartial jury” drawn from a fair cross section of the community has been unenforceable. Indeed, Nebraska defendants and their attorneys stopped making such claims, knowing it was futile to do so without the data. The Court was persuaded by the NAACP that the Court Rule § 6-1003 needed revision to clarify that defendants are entitled to access anonymized, aggregate jury data without precondition, and that State v. Sanders should be viewed as an exception requiring a showing of good cause only when juror names or personal identifying information is sought.

In sum, while the fair cross-section right has lain dormant in Nebraska for a generation, a proverbial dead letter, the January 2026 Reforms are changing that. Defendants and their counsel will now have ready access to the Court System’s aggregate jury data, and there is good reason to be optimistic that the January 2026 Jury Data Reforms will reinvigorate the fair cross-section guarantee not only in Douglas County but in counties all across the State as compliance is based on the geographic demographics of the jury-eligible population of the jurisdiction of each trial court. Thus, based on the State Data Center’s Census research, there are at least twenty-five Nebraska counties in which persons of color reside in numbers that make fair cross-section challenges feasible. While the January 2026 Jury Data reforms are rooted in electronic data and contemporary technology, the constitutional right they protect and implement traces its lineage to the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence; and it continues to be of vital importance in 21st-century America not only to fundamental fairness for defendants in criminal cases but also to the public’s confidence in the integrity and fairness of the criminal justice system itself.

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