When one of the first women ADAs had been hired in Manhattan, she was trying a case, and my father was in the jury pool. The defense attorney was asking all the men if it would bias them against his client that the ADA was such an attractive woman. My father said “No, but it might bias me against your client that his lawyer would ask such an offensive question.” My father got dismissed.
Thats to catch out all the liers who say “No”
They have that here too, but obviously there’s a limited number of challenges to stop both sides rejecting every single person in the jury pool. But the challenges (in Queensland, at least) are issued before the juror gets sworn in - generally as they’re walking up to the bailiff in the courtroom and before they can take the oath/affirmation.
Thirded. What are the consequences of saying “it’s none of your damn business who I voted for, or if I ever went to a porn website”? Or if you just lie?
Regards,
Shodan
I can tell you from my experience as a judge’s assistant, and I sat through a lot of voir dire.
First, people need to stop making the process egocentric. It’s not about you. It’s about making sure the parties receive their judgment from an impartial panel of jurors – or at least, as impartial as those folks can be. To ensure this impartiality, close questioning of jurors is a necessity. It’s personal to you, and most courts are sensitive to this, but it’s not personal to the parties. They’re not looking to “gotcha.” They just want to have a measure of comfort that the people sitting in judgment aren’t bringing their baggage to the process.
Courts are not in the habit of alienating jurors, so they will usually make many accommodations to prospective jurors in the voir dire process. Questionnaires are employed in large trials for a lot of reasons, but among them is the privacy aspect. The attorneys and their parties review the questionnaires on their own time and come back to court prepared to agree or disagree about whom to excuse for cause. Questionnaires are part of the official court record but are usually made a confidential part of that record for obvious reasons. I can’t think of a trial I worked on where confidentiality wasn’t the case, but I have to allow that some judge, somewhere, left them as part of the public record and didn’t make them confidential.
If you are answering questions on the record in open court, which is the much more common situation, and you are uncomfortable, you can always say that to the court and request that your answers be given in camera, meaning privately and out of hearing of the public. The judge will usually invite jurors to do this in cases where sensitive information is likely to arise.
But that’s not what you asked. You asked what would happen if you refused to answer or if you lied. Different questions with different answers.
IANAL and in my experience only – but I think it’s pretty common:
If you refuse to answer in open court, the judge will probably extend an invitation for an in camera hearing. I promise you, it’s hard to continue with your refusal when you’re sitting in the judge’s private chambers with all the parties hanging on your every word.
However, If you continue to refuse, the judge might make an example of you, to discourage other prospective jurors from employing your “tactic” to avoid jury duty. They can hold you in contempt, and they might do that. Or more likely, if they just don’t want to deal with you, they may invite a stipulation from the parties to excuse you. They’ll do this privately, so the rest of the jurors won’t know if you were excused for cause or just because you were recalcitrant about answering questions. It depends largely on if they perceive you have a genuine discomfort with the subject matter or if you’re just being a jerk.
If you lie, the answer is, it depends. If you end up on the jury and it later comes out that you lied and it turns out your lie has a material bearing on the outcome of the trial, then expect to be prosecuted. I’ve seen it happen. Interestingly, I’ve more commonly seen people lie so they could sit on the jury – not to get out of their service. Not good.
Please remember, the parties are spending significant amounts of time and money to go through this process. They want jurors who take their responsibilities seriously and with a sense of civic duty. Yes, if it’s a kiddie porn case, they’re going to ask you about your habits regarding pornography. If it’s a child molest case, they’re going to ask about your personal experiences with molest. If it’s a homicide, they’re going to ask if you’ve ever been close to a murder victim. And so on. It’s important.
Thanks, Aspenglow.
Regards,
Shodan
In general, I think you’d find that attorneys have a lot more finesse in obtaining their answers to those questions without asking them directly. However, in answer some of your questions:
Yes, they can ask a female prospective juror if she has ever terminated a pregnancy and if male, they can ask if you ever encouraged a woman to have a legal abortion. More likely, they would ask something like, “Do you have strong feelings on the abortion debate one way or the other?” That’s really the issue for them.
Yes, they can ask whether you have ever been molested or raped. See my answer to Shodan.
You won’t find lawyers asking jurors what political party they belong to or for whom they voted, or anything about their race or religion. But you will hear them ask the almost comical and tiresome question about bumper stickers. They may ask about your magazine subscriptions, or what websites you regularly read or where you get your daily news. That tells them a lot about your political leanings without directly asking.
Hope this satisfies your curiosity.
Thanks, Aspenglow.
Even if it has nothing to do with the case?
Yep. A good friend of mine was a felony prosecutor and was questioning jurors on a child molestation case. She could tell that one woman really wanted to be on the jury and dismissed her. The woman showed up at my friend’s office the next day first thing in the morning in tears. She said that she totally blew it by not putting her on the jury because it would have been a sure conviction. My friend patiently explained to this idiot, to no avail, why a juror like her was the last thing that she wanted.
No. Relevance would have to be shown. Judges and the attorneys who are trying their cases spent a lot of time up front figuring out how best to spend your time and that of their clients, staff, etc. Apart from such questions being irrelevant, they are unnecessarily invasive and a waste of everyone’s time. They don’t get to ask just because they’re curious – and few, if any, would want to.
Hope this eases your concerns – if you have any, that is. 
Exactly. Yikes. I saw this more than once, too.
Ironically, one of the most surefire ways to get out of jury duty is to act like you’re anxious or eager to get on the jury. It always raises suspicions of the parties, and often with good reason.
In one instance I recall that was similar to your friend’s case was with a juror who lied about knowing one of the chief witnesses/parties to get on the jury. The repercussions of that juror’s misconduct were much more far reaching than just a reversal on appeal. Bail was granted to the defendant while the appeal was pending, and that provided him with the opportunity to visit yet another serious child molest on another child while we waited the 2 years for the Appellate Court to render their judgment. Worse, by the time we got the case back, the witnesses had scattered/died, the child victim was now an adult and didn’t wish to endure another trial… so the fellow skated on the original molest case with just a plea for less than half of what the judge was prepared to impose for sentencing at the time of the original trial.
Most of the mistrials and/or reversals on appeal I saw occurred because of juror misconduct, whether intentional or otherwise. It makes experienced trial attorneys and judges very careful about their jury selection process, I can tell you.
Aspenglow, what kinds of penalties are there for jury members who do those sorts of things?
My favorite story was when I was in a jury pool and this college student felt she had a sure-fire way of getting out of her duty.
Attorney: Do you have any bias that you feel word prejudice you against the defendants?
Her: Well. I’m a psychology student and I’ve learned that we all have prejudices that we can’t control.
Attorney: Thank you.
Her: <grabs purse/bag and starts to stand>
Attorney: We didn’t dismiss you.
Her: <sits down with a shocked look on her face>
Not meaning to be evasive, but as is often the case in legal matters, the answer is, “it depends.”
It depends on how much effect the lie had on the outcome of the trial; if the lie was deliberate or just a bit of a fudge; and/or what reason the juror may have had to offer the lie. In my experience, it didn’t happen often enough where I made a study of it. And while I usually heard through the grapevine that a juror was being prosecuted, I didn’t follow up on what the prosecutor charged them with or the ultimate outcome of their cases. Obviously the court I worked in would be the wrong court to hear the juror’s case (appearance of impropriety), so unless we made it our business to find out, we wouldn’t be actively told about a juror’s plight. In all candor, I had less interest in learning about this than my judges did. Too busy!
I do think people should understand that lying under oath – and that includes your oath as a prospective juror – can be a serious offense that could translate into charges for perjury or jury tampering. You can be charged with either a misdemeanor and/or a felony, depending on circumstances, and that would very likely include a jail or prison term.
Thanks again, Aspenglow.
I beg to differ with Aspenglow.
I’ve seen real jerkish questioning by attorneys. (As noted above.)
One thing that also bugs me is the attorneys deliberating getting rid of anyone with a clue about anything technical. E.g., in one panel apparently the defense was going to try to argue something concerning GPS accuracy. So they were asking if people knew how it worked, etc. So all of those people get “excused”. (I was one of them. And I know how crappy cheapo GPS stuff is. Maybe not their best idea.)
As near as I can tell, the dumber the better. This is not good.
I can’t speak to judges who surf on their laptops, or if that’s in fact what she was doing, and I wouldn’t make that assumption. Some judges are more involved in voir dire than others, and there are bad judges as well as good ones. Can’t say anything about that in your specific situation and again, I am only relating my experience based on years sitting in courtrooms and doing hundreds of jury trials. I am sorry your experience was so negative.
I can also understand how you felt your technical expertise was being trivialized in the case you were called for. It wasn’t, and here’s why: The first rule in trials is that jurors must take their evidence based solely on what is presented to them in the courtroom. With that understanding, I’m sure you can see how anyone who might be a self-appointed “expert” in the jury room would be problematic for the parties. The other jurors are meant to listen to the experts who testify during the trial – not you, or anyone else. Could you have resisted bringing your expertise into the jury room? I doubt it. I know I couldn’t. That’s why you were excused, not because it was a slur on your expertise.
This fundamental rule is so important that I’ve seen a mistrial declared because a juror brought a dictionary into the deliberation room to read the dictionary’s definition of a term used during the trial that the jurors didn’t understand. Instead of sending out a note to ask the judge and parties to give them the definition, a juror brought her dictionary from home instead. The bailiff was new and didn’t realize he had a responsibility to keep such materials out of the jury room. That’s all it took. The dictionary definition wasn’t the important one, the legal definition was, and boom. Mistrial.
Hope this gives you a different perspective, even if it doesn’t change your mind.
When does it stop being technical expertise and start being common sense? I know GPS is based on timing from satellites, I know originally it was deliberately dumbed down to plus-or-minus 10 yeards or some such; I know my cycle path map on my GPS iPhone app has me jump sideways up to several dozen yards from time to time and claims I spiked at over 30mph on my bike (hey, I’m 60 and I’m 270lb - that’ll be the day). Does the lawyer hope that nobody has had a crap experience with a GPS? Those people are getting fewer and fewer.
Do lawyers seriously think people don’t know that expert witnesses are like statistics, they can say whatever you want to hear if you pick the right ones ask the right question?
They know that some people don’t know that. Those are the people they want on the jury. Why bother to get an expert if the jurors won’t believe them?
Also, I’m curious about whether or not an expert risks their professional reputation if they just regurgitate nonsense that’s favorable to one side in a trial. I’d hope that’s the case, which would harm that expert’s chance of being used in a future trial, but I may be overly optimistic.