Citing the resurgence in coronavirus cases, the San Francisco federal court postponed jury trials Thursday until October, even as a handful of trials proceed in local courts.
“Due to a recent increase in COVID-19 cases and in light of the current guidance of public health agencies, the public safety will be best served by limiting the permissible in-court criminal proceedings to 10 people, which necessarily precludes jury trials,” judges in the Northern District of California said in a statement.
The court is based in San Francisco and also has courthouses in Oakland, San Jose and Eureka.
The court had previously allowed federal jury trials to resume July 1 after suspending them for several months.
In a case that had been put on hold shortly after it began in March, a jury in San Francisco on July 10 convicted a Russian man, Yevgeniy Nikulin, of hacking into U.S. computer accounts in 2012 in the business networking site LinkedIn, the cloud storage firm Dropbox and the now-defunct social networking site Formspring and selling the information. Nikulin, 32, has been in custody since late 2016 and is scheduled to be sentenced in September.
Other pending trials had been postponed and can be rescheduled starting in October. For now, the court said, newly arrested defendants will make their initial court appearances before a federal magistrate by telephone or video conference. Other pretrial proceedings may be conducted in courtrooms if attendance can be limited to 10 people, the court said.
Jury trials in civil cases are also postponed, but judges can offer to conduct the trials remotely without a jury if both sides agree, the court said.
In state courts, by contrast, counties across California have been resuming jury trials on their own schedules since a 60-day statewide freeze, ordered by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, expired May 25. San Francisco waited longer than most counties but began its first criminal trial since March on Monday.
But San Mateo County courts, which had resumed criminal jury trials five weeks earlier, halted them for 30 days on Monday after jurors in an ongoing trial were possibly exposed to a court employee who tested positive for COVID-19.
Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @BobEgelko
Bob Egelko has been a reporter since June 1970. He spent 30 years with the Associated Press, covering news, politics and occasionally sports in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento, and legal affairs in San Francisco from 1984 onward. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner for five months in 2000, then joined The Chronicle in November 2000.
His beat includes state and federal courts in California, the Supreme Court and the State Bar. He has a law degree from McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and is a member of the bar. Coverage has included the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the appointment of Rose Bird to the state Supreme Court and her removal by the voters, the death penalty in California and the battles over gay rights and same-sex marriage.