As Deschutes County begins reopening businesses and resuming services, residents can expect to start seeing jury duty notices in the mail.

Upcoming trials will look different. Officials with Deschutes County Circuit Court are remodeling a courtroom to attempt socially distanced jury trials.

“If this works, we’ll have to demo a second courtroom so that we can run two socially distanced jury trials concurrently,” court administrator Jeff Hall told The Bulletin in an email.

The court in Bend has yet to hold a jury trial in the COVID-19 era, though several cases have come close.

On April 6, Oregon Chief Justice Martha Walters ordered Oregon courts to reduce operations to only essential services. Jury trials were rescheduled in Deschutes County and across the state. But Oregon law requires defendants to be tried within 180 days of their arrest or be released from custody.

Under a current plan, Courtroom B upstairs in the Deschutes County Courthouse will be laid out with 13 jurors seated in the back where the public gallery used to be. The defense will sit at the counsel table before the judge and the prosecution will be located against a wall where the jury box used to be. Witnesses will be moved further away from the judge, and more will be allowed to testify by phone.

Members of the public will not be allowed to watch proceedings in the courtroom. Instead, a video feed will be provided in a second courtroom for public access.

With demolition work largely complete, Courtroom B is now bare except for the judge’s bench and clerk’s station.

The remodel of Courtroom B was originally intended to be part of a larger, $1 million effort to modernize three upstairs courtrooms built more than 40 years ago. The project was approved as part of the county’s 2020 capital budget and was to start in the fall, though not all aspects had been hammered out, according to Lee Randall, county facilities director.

The cost of the work now underway is approximately $10,000 and includes removal of built-in storage, the witness stand and the jury box, all of which were slated to be replaced in the future remodel.