A Whiteside County jury panel summoned for an April trial contains at least 60 dead people – including one person who died 35 years ago – raising allegations of a systemic flaw in how Illinois compiles statewide jury lists, according to a motion filed by a defendant’s attorney.

The discovery has prompted a constitutional challenge that goes far beyond Whiteside County, suggesting a statewide problem that systematically excludes younger citizens from jury duty in violation of the Sixth Amendment.

Michael C. Cover’s attorney, James W. Mertes of Sterling, filed the motion Monday, arguing that the April 2026 jury panel for Cover’s May trial must be discharged because it fails to represent a fair cross section of the community.

The numbers are stark. Of the 200 people summoned for jury duty in April, 60 are confirmed dead. The median age of the panel is 72, compared with 43 years for Whiteside County’s actual population. And not a single person younger than 42 was summoned.

“This is not merely a Whiteside County problem,” Mertes wrote. “The problem revealed by the removal of improper exclusion criteria suggests the existence of a potentially more massive, statewide, systemic problem.”

How the problem was discovered

The jury selection crisis in Whiteside County began in February when Mertes discovered the county had been systematically excluding qualified jurors for more than three decades based on age, economic status, pending civil cases, money owed in court cases and criminal history.

Two judges successively discharged jury panels in February and March 2026, with one ruling in March that the exclusions violated state and federal law. The 14th Judicial Circuit judges then appointed a three-member jury commission.

In late March, the jury commission requested a fresh, combined list of potential Whiteside County jurors from the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts – the statewide agency responsible for compiling jury lists from voter registration, driver’s license and unemployment insurance data – and Illinois identification and Illinois Person with a Disability Identification Card holders.

The AOIC provided a list of more than 48,000 names, a number that immediately raised red flags. Whiteside County’s total adult population is about 43,495 people, according to 2020 census data. The list contained about 4,500 more names than the entire adult population of the county.

The jury panel that shouldn’t exist

Working with the court, Mertes and prosecutors have been shaping a process to select jurors fairly. The AOIC list would be completely randomized with no exclusions, and 200 random numbers would be generated using ChatGPT to identify jurors from the randomized list.

During a court hearing Tuesday, Mertes said a meeting with the AOIC last week revealed that of the 200 people summoned:

• 60 people (30%) are confirmed dead, and 43 have death certificates on file in the Whiteside County Clerk’s office. Among those summoned, according to Mertes’s motion, is his own mother, who died April 14, 2006.

• 27 people (13.5%) are reportedly 100 years or older.

• 52 people (26%) are reportedly 90 years or older.

• The oldest person is reportedly 116 years old.

• The youngest person is 42 years old. No one younger than 42 was summoned.

• 70% of the panel is 65 or older, compared with 22.7% of the actual county population.

• 98% of the panel is older than the county’s median age of 43.

The potential root cause: dead people on voter rolls

Mertes’s motion identifies the potential source of the problem: The voter registration data used to compile the AOIC list is never purged of deceased persons.

According to the Illinois Supreme Court’s website, the Jury Act and the Jury Commission Act require that a master jury list be compiled from the list of legal voters, Illinois driver’s license holders, Illinois Identification Card holders, Illinois Person with a Disability Identification Card holders and claimants for unemployment insurance for each county.

“This information is provided by the Illinois State Board of Elections, Illinois Secretary of State and Illinois Department of Employment Services,” according to a jury compilation document posted on the Illinois Supreme Court’s website. “On an annual basis, the AOIC’s JMIS division contacts the above-referenced agencies to request data in a specific format for each Illinois county. Counties also provide the number of potential jurors they want in the jury list and whether they prefer the list to be alphabetic or random.”

The data from these agencies are merged, producing a jury list for each county, according to the Illinois Supreme Court.

The jury application first loads the secretary of state data file, identifying and removing duplicates based on several key fields, keeping only the record with the latest issue date.

The election data is then compared to the secretary of state records. If there is a duplicate, the secretary of state record is kept, and the election record is discarded.

If no duplicates are found, the elections record is added to the jury list. The same process is used for the IDES records, according to the Supreme Court. This process is repeated for each county. The AOIC’s Court Services division then distributes the respective jury lists to each county.

Mertes claims that, unlike driver’s licenses, which expire and must be renewed, or unemployment insurance claims, which have finite durations, voter registration in Illinois continues indefinitely until someone actively cancels it. When people die, their names often remain on the voter rolls.

His motion explains the problem through what statisticians call “differential growth.” As older people die, their names should be removed from the list. But because they aren’t, the older portion of the jury list keeps growing while the younger portion remains stable. Over time, this creates a compositional shift that makes it statistically far more likely that older – and dead – people will be randomly selected.

“As long as the AOIC master list continues to add to the older subgroup without subtracting from it, this problem will only worsen,” Mertes wrote.

A constitutional problem

Mertes argues the systematic exclusion of everyone younger than 42 violates the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee that juries be drawn from a fair cross section of the community.

“Systematically excluding jurors below the age of 42 deprives the jury of a fair cross section of the community,” according to the motion. “It removes an entire generation or more of citizens whose experiences, economic realities, family structures, employment patterns, and social perspectives are distinct from those of older age groups.”

The motion argues that younger and middle-aged adults bring perspectives shaped by modern workplaces, technology, housing costs, student debt and contemporary social conditions – all of which affect how jurors assess credibility, reasonableness and human behavior.

“A jury composed only of older citizens may be sincere and conscientious, but it cannot replicate the perspective of a panel drawn from all eligible adults,” according to the motion.

What happens next

Mertes is asking the court to find that the data source or sources used for compilation of the combined list provided by the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts “results in flawed differential growth of the older subgroup due to non-purging of the deceased and thereby necessarily results in systematic age-based exclusion of a younger population so vast that the jury venire does not adequately represent a cross-section of the community.”

He also is asking to discharge the April 2026 jury panel and order a new jury panel be assembled.

Cover’s motion to discharge the April 2026 jury panel is set for a hearing alongside a pretrial conference at 9 a.m. May 7. Mertes said he intends to call a mathematician, a sociologist, the Whiteside County circuit clerk and members of the AOIC to testify before the court.