Those short questionnaires are useful to the Attorneys What does your spouse do for a living? Versus “are you married? Yes, What does your spouse do for a living?”
It’s certainly not a big help, but chalk it up to tradition. It could be eliminated
It leaves out people who are with a long term partner but not married to them.
Or It’s complicated?
Nope
I know of a couple who lived together for 7+ years. They didn’t get married because she had a medical condition & she would’ve lost whatever governmental health benefits (Medicaid?) if she was no longer single. Despite sharing a bed with someone, the gov’t considered her single because she didn’t pay for a piece of paper & said two words. When she was in the hospital again & it was apparent it was for the last time they got married, in her hospital room; she died w/in 36 hrs. He went from single to widowed in less than a weekend. I know other couples who live together but are not married; again, not much difference between them & married couples (except maybe some hospital rights).
If the lawyers wanted to know if you live with a SO or live by yourself / with a non-romantic roommate, maybe, but one’s status in regards to some paperwork is intrusive BS.
…or what @hajario said.
In my experience, there’s no set format for juror questionnaires. There’s usually name, age, and employment information, and sometimes something more specific to the type of case.
But - from a lawyer standpoint- picking a jury is like bad speed dating. We want to get a sense of who you are, what you are like, in just a few minutes of interaction.
If there’s a bad question - like excluding unmarried couples who cohabitate - a lawyer can always follow up with the jury pool, but there’s no reason that they can’t fix the forms.
ETA: To be clear, the lawyers usually don’t construct the juror questionnaires, although they might get to offer input if it was an especially high profile/emotional case (I.e. there’s going to be a lot of people who will be excluded). Instead, the lawyers usually just get handed the filled out forms a few minutes before they meet everybody who just filled them out.
If you’re in a long term relationship with someone but not married, you’re Single. Same thing you’d put on your tax return.
Sure, as far as the IRS is concerned. As far as the woman I’ve lived with for the past 18 years though? Neither of us identifies as “single”.
It’s an interesting tangent about what we ask Jurors. Believe me, a lot of thought has been put into jury selection by attorneys and social scientists. It is perhaps the most important part of a trial. I know an attorney from Florida that swears he can predict the result just by seeing what jury was selected. Personally, I’m not quite that cynical.
I have not seen anyone argue that you can tell much by “marital status.”
As Moriarty said, the basic forms the court gives out were not designed by the parties, but probably by some clerk who was told to create a form. So you get things like age, employment, years in the county, number of children, and educational level. Basic demographic info. We use that during our social media searches to confirm we’re identifying the right on line person. And make no mistake, if you’re in the room for jury selection, someone is searching on line to find out everything they can about you.
There’s a lot of theorizing about jury selection, but no hard and fast rules that I’m aware of.
Some people specialize in trying to divine strategies or determine who makes a good juror; in fact, it’s what initially led “Dr. Phil” to meet Oprah - he specialized in jury selection, and she had a big trial in Texas when she was sued by a bunch of cattle ranchers for saying that she wasn’t going to eat hamburgers because of the risk of mad cow disease.
But there are also lawyers who just get up, make sure nobody who might serve on the jury has a scheduling conflict, and then sit back down.
I’ve given up on trying to figure out a jury. I’ve tried the whole “punch their name in social media” idea to try to figure out who I’m dealing with, but there’s rarely enough time to do a real deep dive and I’m skeptical that I would even come up with a true sense of the person.
Instead, I think jury selection is just about presenting yourself as a nice, friendly person who is just trying to get a fair trial, while also excluding people with obvious problems (maybe somebody is falling asleep, or doesn’t seem to be following along, or has some pressing personal issue that will be an ongoing distraction). Getting the jury to like and trust you, I think, is just about the best thing a lawyer can shoot for.
(There’s other tactics that go into jury selection - sometimes lawyers try to “set the stage” for their later arguments. Oftentimes this get done by using analogies (a popular one is about baking a cake. Just as a cake must have all ingredients added to come out correctly, a crime must have all of its elements proven for it to have occurred. Or, an effective juror is like the referee in a football game, instead of a fan, because the ref just wants to get the call right whereas the fan has a rooting interest in the outcome). But, I’ve seen lawyers fumble those analogies, and it can be quite embarrassing to see an entire panel of jurors look at a lawyer with a confused expression (“why is he asking about eggs, milk, sugar, and flour?”)
Yeah, I get that, but it’s one of those things where I usually say (to myself or someone else) “answer the question they asked, not the question you think they want the answer to”.
They asked if you’re married, you’re not, you’re single. Just like when I was going through a divorce. There was a span of a few months where I was still married, but my (then) wife had long since moved out. I still answered ‘married’ on those forms even though, for all intents and purposes, I very much wasn’t.
As “some clerk,” I can tell you we did not design the forms. In the venue where I worked, we rarely used questionnaires. When we did, it was for big cases expected to churn through a lot of PJs. Questionnaire design was assigned to the attorneys, with the judge being the arbiter over what would go into the finalized form.
In our venue, questionnaires were always customized for the particular trial for which they were used.
We have a team of about 10 people filling in a google doc spreadsheet in real time, with numbers and color codes. We get voter registration info where available, and anything we can find on social media. About 80% of what we find is not too useful, but the other 20% can certainly impact who we decide to strike (or ask additional questions). When you have $100,000 or more of your own money invested in a case, it would be crazy not to get all the info we can. In many cases, it’s pretty obvious who you don’t want, but there’s almost always one decision at the end of voir dire between two or three potential jurors. In a recent trial there was one woman I probably would have struck because of her profession. (there’s not a lot to go on after only an hour questioning 40 people, so we do have to rely on generalizations sometimes.) On social media we saw she was quite liberal and had some stuff about Justice Ruth Ginsburg that we liked. We kept her, and she was fine.
I would do the same. My point a few posts back was that it’s a bad question for the exact reason.
I was up for a couple of murder cases (did not get picked, happily) and they all had forms specific to the case. They asked if I knew specific people.
I only got the form after being picked for the pool.
BTW, in Alameda County, before Covid it was one and done and for a specific courthouse. Now it is all week (but you don’t have to go unless you are selected for a day) in one of several courthouses. I just got a summons. I’ll probably do it, but since I’m over 70 I’m eligible to be excused for age.
Right, for example, being forced to fill out a long questionable giving massive personal info- which is given to the defense attorney, and then of course a crooked one can pass the info on to the perps gang who makes threats.
No one seems to care about protecting the jury.
And those questionnaires- full of questions that could be used to blackmail or embarrass someone. I am talking about a high profile case- I was asked many very personal questions- was I ever arrested, did I know any police officers, had I ever committed any crimes for which I was not arrested, what did I thing about Capital punishment, do I drink alcoholic beverages, , etc etc etc.
What happens if a juror simply refuses to answer some of the questions?
I did not mean “clerk” in the sense of law clerk or court clerk. I meant someone in the clerk’s office who had to come up with a form (probably two generations ago). Agree with you about more extensive questionnaires. They’re usually reserved for cases that would have a unique need for one. I’d say about 1 out of 10 of our trials. I don’t find them that useful, except, we do get the names of the potential jurors in advance, which is very helpful.
Courts put a lot of effort into protecting the jurors. There are rules about how the questionnaires are handled (shredded after use), what ends up in the court file, etc.
I get that jury service is a pain, but judges are often elected and they really bend over backwards to make jurors feel safe and appreciated.
The purpose of a jury is to determine if someone has committed a crime.
The protections are for a person that the state is trying to put away, potentally for a very long time, or possibly to kill.
In the balance between someone having to give up some work time, or someone who may have their liberty taken away for many years, or be killed by the state, who deserves to have greater protections from the state?
This is ignorance on a scale almost unimaginable. No defense attorney who valued his ability to practice law for long would even contemplate such a thing.
As @Procrustus states, judges do bend over backwards to protect jurors in every possible way. Confidentiality is of utmost importance to judges and lawyers. Again, no defense attorney who wished to continue to practice would use information gleaned from juror questionnaires for an unlawful or immoral purpose. Your statements verge on paranoia, or are perhaps borne of watching too many fantastical law shows.
It would depend on the reason for refusing to answer. The judge would likely take the individual in camera with only court staff and lawyers present to question them privately. If the juror simply continued to refuse without offering a basis, then probably one of two things: If the judge felt the juror was gaming the system, contempt charges could be laid. If the judge felt the juror had some genuine basis to refuse (appears frightened, e.g.), the judge would likely solicit a joint agreement between the attorneys to simply excuse the juror.
No competent judge or lawyer wants a hostile juror on their jury. It’s the stuff of mistrials, and no one wants that. If the idea of doing your civic duty is abhorrent to you for whatever reason, there’s an extremely good chance you won’t be invited to serve.
You’re clearly misinformed.
The crooked attorneys pass it along to the perp’s gang so they can bribe the jurors.
Oh well, your loss.