Jury trials will remain on hold in Whiteside County after University of Chicago mathematicians’ work, though not complete, is pointing to irregularities in the way jury pools are selected.

Whiteside County Circuit Court Judge James Heuerman, working alongside Whiteside County State’s Attorney Colleen Buckwalter and Sterling defense attorney James Mertes, ruled Tuesday to again reschedule a Rockford man’s trial because doubt exists as to whether the jury pool selection process is randomized enough to ensure a fairly balanced jury is selected.

The ruling came just one day before the start of Michael Cover’s jury trial on charges of aggravated battery and obstructing a police officer. Cover, 33, is facing those charges in connection with a Sept. 11 fight inside the Whiteside County Jail.

His first trial date, set for Feb. 10, was rescheduled after questions surfaced about how the Whiteside County Circuit Clerk’s Office was selecting potential jurors. Since then, the trial has been rescheduled five times throughout the course of 21 court hearings about the jury selection process and how it is taking place at the state and county levels.

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Cover was set to go to trial on Tuesday, June 9, but on Monday morning, the start date was moved to Wednesday as the trio was waiting for a report from the team of University of Chicago mathematicians. That team worked over the weekend to determine if names selected to create jury panels in Whiteside County are being chosen at random.

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The report was expected to be completed on Tuesday morning, but it had not yet been received by Mertes on Tuesday afternoon. He said the math team has been reviewing and comparing Whiteside County’s state-provided master jury list of 48,300 names that was then run through a computer program to get it down to a list of 12,500, from which 100 names were selected to become the jury pool.

Mertes told the court Monday and reiterated Tuesday that the initial information he has heard points to a selection that is not randomized, as five of the 100 had also appeared on previous jury pool lists over the past four months, something he described as “statistically impossible.”

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Another name appeared on the jury pool list, but not on the list of 12,500 from which the jury pool list was derived, he said.

With questions continuing to linger, Heuerman set a pretrial conference date of July 10 in the lead-up to Cover’s next trial date, now set for July 14. That hearing could include testimony from the owner of a software company, whose jury programs are used in Whiteside County, as well as a jury commissioner, Mertes said.

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Mertes also said he would be filing a motion to discharge the current jury pool in light of the math team’s work.

The jury trial, when it does begin, is expected to last three to four days.