Juries: The Missing Case of Loving

The law has so few customers in West Texas' oil-rich, 647-sq.-mi. Loving County that no one has been put in jail there for the past five years. So isolated are Loving's 160 citizens that the county seat of Mentone (pop. 50) was once suggested as the ideal place to get an impartial jury for Jack Ruby. Just how miserable that move would have made Loving was made clear in a rare order just handed down by State District Judge J. H. Starley. Confronted with a troublesome property deed case in Mentone, Judge Starley counted up Loving's grand total of 80 qualified jurors and banished the case to another county on the unusual ground that he could not possibly muster a Loving jury "without completely closing down the economic life of the county."