MACON, Ga. — Two Macon murder trials have now been postponed.
The reason?
Jurors aren't showing up.
Chief Judge Howard Simms says right now, there are 80 people sitting in the Bibb County Jail charged with murder.
As jurors fail to show up, he says the criminal justice system already running behind because of COVID-19, grinds to a screeching halt.
Last month, Simms was forced to postpone the trial for 20-year-old Jeremy Kendrick.
"After the jury was seated, three of the jurors didn't come back," he says.
Kendrick is accused of murdering two convenience store clerks during robberies in 2018.
The trial of his accused accomplice, Arie Calloway, got postponed on Monday.
"We wound up with 36 people out of 200 that got summoned and that is, mathematically, that is the bare minimum that you can have to pick a jury."
He says with the huge backlog of cases caused by the pandemic, this is the last thing they need.
"The system completely grinds to a halt. The criminal justice system if we can't put jurors in the box," he says. "If there aren't enough people here to do that, then at some point, the only option then is to open up the jail and say, 'Alright everybody, go home. We've got no business we can do down here.'"
He says he knows it can be a burden to show up for jury duty.
"I understand full well how inconvenient it is, I understand that people have other things to do."
But if you don't show, he says there are consequences.
"I can send the Sheriff up to pick them up, bring them down here and we can have a show cause hearing and if I find them in contempt I can put them in jail," he says.
He says if you're not showing up, you don't have a right to complain.
"If you're not willing to come down and do that, then you really don't have much right to complain about crime and violence and all the other stuff that's going on because you are an integral part of the solution to that problem."
Simms says he's not sure why people aren't showing up, but he does know it's not fair to anyone.
"You've got people sitting in jail, you've got their families who want them out, you've got the victim's families who want some sort of end to the process. They want their voice heard and none of that is happening," says Simms.
Once the trial term is over, Simms says he has every intention of getting the sheriff's office to round up the jurors who didn't show up and have them appear before all five judges and explain why they weren't there.
Other counties in our area have close to a 50 or 60 percent response rate when jurors are summoned, but according to Simms, Bibb county is currently seeing less than 20 percent.
Bibb County Superior Court Clerk Erica Woodford says since the pandemic, her office has been summoning more people than they used to in the hopes that they will hit their target number, but she says the results right now are still shockingly low.
Woodford says it's not fair to the people who actually do show up and when they don't have enough, it's a waste of everyone's time.