look at the answer or on this and this demos. In the demo two features are demonstrated

1) saving selected state as parmanent. The items don't loss the "selected" state over local sorting, paging or filtering.

2) sorting by the selected column ('cb' column). The feature can be practical because sometime it's interesting to see all items which are selected now. I can imagine that the feature could be also intresting and one could introduce new jqGrid booleat option multiselectSortable which could define the style of the column header over the 'cb' column.

The implementation of both features can be very simple. I used just cb property in the items of the data parameter which hold local data. Additionally I defined custom sorting for the 'cb' column.

In the answer to another question are included the demo which makes selection state persistant without making the selection column sortable.

I think that one could implement the corresponding features in the main code of jqGrd.

Best regards
Oleg