A Valley man who was deported nearly a year ago has now been summoned for jury duty.
Gillian Bailey said her husband, Stuart Bailey, who owned a Scottsdale Italian restaurant, was detained by ICE officials at their Scottsdale home during an early morning roundup of illegal immigrants last December.
Bailey who had overstayed his visa in the United States had two DUI arrests on his record — the latest stemming back to five years ago.
Since his deportation, his family has been struggling to rebuild their lives.
Bailey had been working in England for the last year, so Gillian Bailey thought it was very ironic that he had been summoned for jury duty — nearly a year after he was told to leave the United States.
"My first reaction was to chuckle to myself because I did think it was pretty ironic," Bailey said. "You gotta laugh at stuff like this; it's not funny what happened to us, but it is funny he gets summoned to jury duty while they call him a threat to the American people."
Her husband's reaction from England was also tinged with humor.
"He said he would be honored to come back and do his jury duty," Bailey said.
Maricopa County Superior Court officials said mistakes like this were surprisingly not uncommon. They sent out jury duty summons based on records they got from drivers licenses and voter registration rolls.
Bryan Bouchard, a spokesman for the Maricopa County Superior Court, issued the following statement:
"You must be a citizen to serve jury duty.
We ID those names through voter rolls/DMV records. Of course, permanent residents and people on other valid visas in the U.S. can receive a drivers license. Once a person receives the summons they are informed that they can go online to respond. There is a prompt online for non-citizens to opt-out at that point due to their immigration status. If they come in-person to the court in response to the summons vs. online, there are several points in the process when they arrive for them to self-identify as non-citizens.
As they identify themselves, the names are compiled each month and sent to ensure they are not on the voter rolls (in case citizens claim non-citizenship to get out of jury duty), and then the names are removed from future lists. So the voter rolls/DMV is updated monthly.
Each month, the court receives a new list for potential jurors from those sources.
Regarding the bench warrant question. That in itself is a lengthy process to reach the end of. Jurors are summonsed 3 times before any process like that takes place with a bench warrant being the very last resort. Majority of the time, if someone has moved out of state or is a non-citizen, that information is provided to the court. "
