Johnson, on felony murder and arson charges later
that year, he has still not faced trial. “It’s never-
ending,” says Deem’s mother Susan Deem.
Deem’s family was hopeful Johnson would be tried
in 2020 after a judge in November 2019 rejected a
defense motion to move the trial out of the county.
“But then the pandemic hit,” Deem’s mother says.
With the trial still looming, Susan Deem, 52, says it’s
a constant reminder of what was lost when her son
died—a loving father, whose third child was born
three months after his death, and a courageous pub-
lic servant. “Every time there is some kind of hear-
ing, it just brings back everything all over again,” she
says. “That’s the hard part. I wish it would just get
over and done with.”
If the current state of the public- health crisis is
any indicator, that may not happen for a long time.
In January, COVID-19 killed more people in the U.S.
than in any other month so far, and the nation’s death
toll is more than 500,000, according to data from
Johns Hopkins University. In Bexar County, where
Johnson’s trial would be held, jury trials have been
frozen at least until the end of March 2021. Rangel,
who’s tasked with determining whether to lift the
moratorium then, says he “currently cannot fore-
see” doing so.
The firsT few courTs in the U.S. to stop jury se-
lection and postpone new criminal and civil trials
did so around the time of Marshall’s death, in March
2020, when health officials began urging millions of
Americans to stay at home and keep 6 ft. away from
others when venturing out. Even the U.S. Supreme
Court postponed oral arguments for the first time in
more than 100 years. By fall 2020, some criminal tri-
als had resumed with restrictions, including in areas
of New York State, where each county was allowed to
hold one criminal trial at a time in courtrooms outfit-
ted with plexiglass barriers and jury seats spaced sev-
eral feet apart. But the reopening was short-lived. A
surge in COVID-19 cases around the holidays forced
another round of restrictions. At the end of Novem-
ber, about two dozen U.S. district courts nationwide
resuspended jury trials and grand-jury proceedings,
marking a “significant pause” in efforts by federal
courts to resume full operation, court officials said.
Today, even in jurisdictions where in-person pro-
ceedings have resumed, limits on how many people
can be in a courtroom at one time for things like jury
selection continue to slow the system.
“We’re in sort of this holding period,” says Paula
Hannaford- Agor, director of the Center for Jury Stud-
ies at the National Center for State Courts (NCSC).
In a prepandemic world, state trial courts typi-
cally resolved 18 million felony and misdemeanor
cases annually, according to an NCSC study in Au-
gust, and an estimated 8 million to 10 million U.S.
citizens reported for jury duty each year. Hannaford-
Agor does not see jury trials returning to any sem-
blance of normality until at least 2022. About 45 to
60 people are needed for jury selection in most typi-
cal felony cases, she says. More than 600 prospec-
tive jurors were summoned for Harvey Weinstein’s
New York rape trial, which ended in his conviction
just before COVID-19 toppled courts. “Most courts
are not set up to be able to have that kind of group
size while maintaining social distancing,” Hannaford-
Agor says. “Every body keeps thinking, ‘Well, we’re
kind of getting to the end of this.’ I don’t think we are.”
wiTh mosT Trial proceedings at a standstill, a
host of new problems plague the nation’s criminal-
justice system. The longer it takes to bring a case to
trial, the greater the chance that key witnesses will
die or forget details. There are also long- standing ra-
cial and economic inequities underscored by remote
courts. Low-income defendants and defendants of
color, the demographic most likely to have lost jobs
during the pandemic, have struggled to get access
to the Internet or to devices needed for virtual tri-
als, hearings or conversations with attorneys, ac-
cording to Tina Luongo, attorney in charge of the
criminal- defense practice at the Legal Aid Society,
who is based in New York City. “People lost their
jobs; they’ve lost their homes,” Luongo says. “The
last thing they’re thinking about is, Can I get on
Skype or Microsoft Teams?”
Even more alarming to public defenders is how
multiple states have suspended laws that set dead-
lines for prosecutors aimed at protecting defen-
dants’ rights to speedy trials. Defense attorneys say
Photos of Janie
Marshall are
on display in
her niece’s
Brooklyn home
1.1
MILLION
Number of
cases stalled in
Florida courts
50
Number of
states that
have curtailed
or canceled
in-person
criminal court
proceedings
since
March 2020
