Court Computer Says All Hartford Is Dead - NYTimes.com

Search All NYTimes.com

Court Computer Says All Hartford Is Dead

Published: September 30, 1992

**HARTFORD, Sept. 29— ** Court officials have figured out why Hartford residents were excluded from Federal grand jury pools over the past three years: The computer that selected names thought everyone in the city was dead.

Federal District Court workers discovered the computer error while investigating why no Hartford residents had been on lists of prospective grand jurors.

The city's name had been listed in the wrong place on computer records, forcing the "d" at the end of "Hartford" into the column used to describe the status of prospective jurors. "D" stands for dead.

So every time the names of Hartford residents popped up for jury duty, the computer noted the deaths and declined to send them juror questionnaires, said Kevin Rowe, chief Federal clerk.

The problem came to light in a lawsuit challenging the racial makeup of the grand jury that indicted Luis Colon Osario, a defendant in the $7.1 million robbery of a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford in 1983.