How probing and intimate can jury selection questions be?

Factual Questions
1

I’m not looking for legal advice and I don’t need an answer quickly. I’m merely curious.

Say you’ve been called for jury duty. How deeply into your personal life are the lawyers for the prosecution and the defense allowed to probe? Obviously, they are going to ask you your age, address, occupation and whether you have already made up your mind as to the defendant’s guilt or innocence. How far beyond that can they take their questioning?

For instance, let’s say the case at hand involves a bomb set off in an abortion clinic. Can the attorneys for either side ask you, the potential juror, what your stand on abortion is? Can they ask you, if female, if you’ve ever terminated a pregnancy? If male, can they ask if you have ever encouraged or facilitated a woman to obtain a legal abortion?

Let’s take another example, where the case involves a charge of sexual battery. Can the lawyers ask you about your sexual history and whether you have ever been molested or raped?

Just in general, can the lawyers screening jurors ask what political party you belong to? Whom you voted for? Can they ask your religion? What you think about a certain ethnic group?

What if you’re asked a question that you think is nobody’s damn business. Can you politely decline to answer? What would happen if you say, “I’m sorry, but that is a very personal question and I am not comfortable answering it?” Will you be held in contempt?

2

Very deeply.

Yes, yes, and yes.

“Can they ask your religion? What you think about a certain ethnic group?” those they would have to get the judges permission. say a hate crime? Then could be.

You can be. You might be able to get away with it, if you are generally going along with everything else.

3

It can get pretty invasive. One panel I was on, each pool member was asked about certain mental conditions, if they had them, if someone they knew, etc. All out in public.

The lawyers said at first that “personal” stuff would be asked in solo sessions (the initial questions were on forms) but that got quickly ignored. Several people were quite upset about it. And still the judge just sat there surfing on her laptop.

4

The attorneys can (and will) probe deeply into such matters. Obviously, they won’t ask about things completely unrelated to the issue… for example, if the crime is a robbery, there’s no point to asking about your thoughts on abortion. But their job is to discern who might be unfairly biased, and that requires personal questions. Taking your example of someone charged with bombing an abortion clinic, there are a lot of people who might well have an outlook like “I think abortion is 100% wrong and would never vote to convict someone who bombed an abortion clinic” and those people need to be off the jury. So the questions need to be asked.

What I often see is if a personal issue arises, the judge will ask everyone to leave the courtroom except for the judge, lawyers, potential juror and court reporter (or, those people will squeeze into the judge’s chambers in the back). To try and make it a bit less intimidating. If you still refused to answer the judge would likely just excuse you and have you called back for jury service on a different sort of trial.

5

DrDeth, ftg and magnusblitz, thank you all very much for your interesting – if rather alarming – answers.

6

Many judges are more respectful about allow private questioning. The questions, however, are usually allowed. If you’re in that situation, would advise you inform everyone you are uncomfortable talking about some of these things, and request it be done private, if at all.

You’ll be glad to hear most cases don’t touch on such sensitive subjects. Sec crime trials are the most common, but it happens in other types of cases too.

7

Ca you reply “Your questioning is getting sufficiently offensive that I’m inclined to find the defendant innocent/guilty just to stick it to you”?

8

Sure, if the questioning has been going on a bit. If that’s your first response the judge isn’t likely to look kindly upon it.

9

In Queensland (and I believe the rest of Australia) they don’t ask any questions at all - it’s up to any jurors who get sworn in to own up and say “Actually, I’m prejudiced against everyone in the universe” or whatever, when the judge asks the jury if there’s any reason anyone on it can’t serve.

10

I get called for jury duty on a regular basis. From what I’ve seen here in California, the judges are usually very respectful of the jurors’ privacy. Where there have been extensive and specific questions, there has sometimes been a written jury questionnaire to fill out before voir dire. If there are personal questions in open court, the judge may call the juror to confirm privately either at the bench or in his office. On one murder trial, the jurors were asked if they’d ever been involved in a murder case. One tearful woman said that her brother had been murdered. The judge called her up and spoke with her privately before dismissing her. I was once called into the judge’s office to discuss my father (who knew the judge personally), and any influence that might have on the case.

When I’ve seen situations with TMI, it’s always been from a juror who went beyond the scope of the question to tell his own backstory or give an opinion. Those jurors usually get dismissed.

11

So they tell you what the case is about and the identities of those involved? How exactly do they do that without tilting the first impressions of the prospective jurors one way or another? The wording must be very precise. How do they prevent later discoveries - “Wow. His girlfriend work with my mother… I never knew that.”

12

Sometimes they will ask if anyone knows <specific person’s name>. Sometimes they will ask something like if anyone has close friends or family in law enforcement. They will ask if anyone has ever been the victim of a crime. They ask a barrage of all kinds of questions, depending on what they’re going to try to make their case about. For example, one jury I was on there were lots of questions about how do you feel about the police, any family in law enforcement, etc etc. Turns out one of the big issues in the trial was whether a police officer was lying, mistaken, or otherwise unreliable in describing what he saw. Same sorts of questions in another trial I was a juror on, which had to do with assault of a corrections officer. Does it affect the jurors in the end that they sat and had to listen to questions about how they feel about the reliability of the police, eyewitness accounts, etc. as well as people’s responses about why they do or don’t trust police officers and the things they say? Yeah, it does, but it’s part of the game in that based on the responses both sides get to kick the most reactionary respondents out of the pool if they wish. The whole thing is an elaborate dance, and the rules are complicated. Things that seem like they should matter often don’t, and things that seem trivial can actually be a pretty big deal. “His girlfriend works with my mother” probably wouldn’t make much substantive difference. Actually a juror on the most recent trial I sat on eventually interrupted and said she just realized that one of the defendant’s lawyers was her mother’s neighbor or something. A few more questions about whether there was actually some relationship or anything there, and everybody pretty much blew it off as “thanks for the heads up, but…whatever.”

13

Exactly. In the rare case where there is a surprise revelation in the middle of trial that the juror knows someone or something too close for comfort, they can be excused and an alternate used to replace them.

14

As has been stated, they can ask all sorts of stuff. Here (pdf) is the questionnaire given to the jury pool in the hot car murder trial in Atlanta, which was stopped before jury selection was complete and moved to another location where it is just about to start again.

Questions include: “Have you ever looked at a pornographic web site?”, “Have you… ever had a sexual addiction?”

15

I served on a jury last year.

The way it works in our county is that you are sent a questionnaire to fill out. Then you show up for your week (typically) of jury duty. You sit in a large room with all of the other potential jurors and wait for a case to come along. When a case comes in, a pool of about 20 to 30 or so jurors is chosen at random. Since it is random, it’s entirely possible to go in there for an entire week and never get called. However, if you serve on a case and that case ends, you go back to the room with the other potential jurors and, again since it is random, you can get called again. So some folks never served on a case and some folks served on more than one.

When I got picked for a pool, we went up to the courtroom and were all seated according to our juror numbers. At that point the prosecutor and defense both got to ask us a bunch of questions. Typically it was “does anyone have a family member who works in law enforcement, if so raise your hand” with various other questions and people would raise their hands accordingly and each side would note which jurors raised their hands to each question. In our case, the questions weren’t all that probing or intimate. They did ask about our opinions on illegal drug use, legalization of marijuana, and stuff like that. I got the impression that refusing to answer wasn’t an option. I suppose that if you were the type of person who illegally uses drugs some of those questions might have been uncomfortable. One woman did admit that she saw absolutely nothing wrong with people illegally using drugs no matter what the law said.

After that, the prosecution and defense took turns crossing people off of the list until they whittled us down to 12 jurors. Everyone else was sent back to the main room.

Once it was just the 12 of us, only then did we find out who the defendant was and what the case was about. In our case it was possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a weapon by someone who is not allowed to possess a weapon. Basically, the police raided a crack house and this guy was there with a crack pipe sitting on the table in front of him, and when they searched his apartment upstairs they found a gun (he’s a convicted felon). We were given instructions about what the law was, the meaning of possession (there’s two types - one if you actually have the thing in your hand, the other if it is under your control but not on you personally - the example the prosecutor gave was his notepad was his possession even though it was in his office on his desk and he was here in the courtroom with us). We were also told that the prosecution and defense would present evidence, but those were not facts. It was up to us to determine what the facts were.

We found him guilty on the drug possession but not guilty on the gun possession since there were other people that lived in the apartment and a bunch of drug dealers and users constantly going in and out of it and the gun really could have belonged to any one of them.

We got picked for the pool at about 10 am, were whittled down to 12 jurors before noon, took a break for lunch, and the trial ended around 4:30 pm.

16

If they didn’t show his fingerprints were on the pipe (were they?), why would he be guilty of possession in a house where several people presumably came and went? Because he had a favourite spot n the couch?

17

Thank you, everybody, for your replies. Amarone, that pdf was fascinating and also a little daunting. There were definitely a couple questions on it that I would be reluctant to answer.

18

Well, honestly, you should stand up and dispute them. Let the Judge know the question is not relevant and overly personal.

Also note that some crooked Lawyers will feed info from jury questionnaires to their gangster clients, who will then target the families of the Jurors. Rare.

19

He was sitting at the table with the crack pipe right in front of him on the table. The instructions that we were given were that we had to determine was whether we believed that he was in control of the crack pipe at that time. The pipe was on the table directly in front of him, not off to the side or anyplace that would indicate that it may have belonged to someone else. There was no one else near the table at that time. It may have been someone else’s crack pipe. but at that moment he had control of it.

ETA: There were no fingerprints on either the crack pipe or the gun.

20

DrDeth, really? Should I be cupping my ears to detect whooshing?