This varies considerably depending on the location and the individual trial.
The precise numbers vary from court to court and possibly from trial to trial, but typically either lawyer is allowed to object to a potential juror “for cause”, giving some specific reason why they think that juror can’t be impartial, and then the judge has to agree or disagree with that. These are generally unlimited in number, beyond the fuzzy unwritten limits from testing the judge’s patience, because we don’t want blatantly biased people on a jury, no matter how common that bias is in the potential jury pool. In addition to that, typically each side will have some number of strikes for which they don’t have to give any reason, just that they don’t want that particular juror. I think that, technically speaking, they’re not allowed to use those for reasons of protected classes (like, you can’t say “We’re striking that guy because he’s black”, but in practice, since no reason is given, it’s almost impossible to prove that. Of course, a lawyer will generally try to get someone dismissed for cause before they use that, in hopes of not having to use one of their limited number.
I imagine that the judge is also allowed to strike a particular juror with cause, even if neither lawyer requested it, but I don’t imagine that that’s too common, because typically, one or the other legal team will want that juror gone.
It’s also possible for a juror to request to be excused, because they can’t afford to take off work, or because they have to take care of family members, or because they’ve got something going on that can’t be rescheduled, or whatever. The court might or might not honor these requests, of course. And I think that these are usually handled before the lawyers get involved, so as to not waste any more peoples’ time than necessary.
Not just impartial. Not qualified to serve.
If somebody is having surgery tomorrow, and needs to drink some gross laxative today; or they are the only person available to pick up the kids from school that day; or they barely speak English, those are all for cause reasons.
So, too, is somebody who says they can’t be fair or impartial, or won’t follow the law for some reason. Commonly, the judge will ask if anybody has any religious belief that prevents them from sitting in judgment of another person. I also once had a case where a woman insisted that she would need to hear from more than one person before she would feel like a case was proven (despite best efforts to convince her that, presuming she believed the one person testifying, she would accept their testimony as true. Nope, she insisted that she’d also want to see a video or hear from a second person)
It’s not a technically, it’s unconstitutional to kick somebody off due to their protected status. If a minority is removed, the other side can make a “Batson challenge”, which obligates the other side to provide a class-neutral reason for the removal.
Batson challenge | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute.
She may or may not have had a religious basis for that; but it isn’t a new idea.
Deuteronomy 19:15
A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed. Only on the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses shall a charge be established.
IANAEngineer but I’ve worked with many, many of them over the course of my career, with my job being to translate engineer into English. In my experience many engineers can not fathom the phrase, “reasonable doubt.” If there is doubt, then it can’t be true, and if it can’t be true it must be false. Engineers also expect non-engineers to be as precise in their terminology as an engineer would be. If a witness described a car as Surf Green, an engineer might decide anyone who couldn’t tell the difference between Surf Green and Silverleaf Green (the My Cousin Vinny distinction) couldn’t be credible, instead of considering that maybe the car was 50 feet away, the lighting was less than optimum, or the witness was unfamiliar with the names of automobile paint colors.
I don’t do jury trials, but I’ve heard from other lawyers that the concern is that people with high post-secondary education may have a tendency to put more emphasis on their own factual beliefs than to listen to the evidence. If you’ve earned a Ph.D., you’ve spent years developing your own knowledge base, and then teaching it to undergrads, whom you normally assume don’t know or understand the concepts, and your job is to correct them.
That’s not the kind of attitude you want for a juror. You want someone who will listen with an open mind.
@Voyager 's post explains this point well:
One comment I got from a Crown prosecutor has stayed with me. The Crown said: “If I’m running a complex fraud trial, I want smart people on the jury. I don’t want dummies who won’t be able to understand the evidence.”
When I got called to Federal Jury duty in the court room the first thing the judge did was ask who was a college student. Then he immediately dismissed them because finals were starting the next day.
Right, but if the juror is having surgery or needs to take care of their kids or whatever, it’s probably going to be the juror themself raising the objection, not either of the lawyers.
Sure, but it’s almost always going to be possible to come up with some class-neutral reason. Proving that’s not the actual reason is going to be difficult, and require a large body of data (almost certainly much more than one trial’s worth), and even if you do prove, after many trials, that they were biased, what happens to all of the trials that were already decided?
Surely, any juror, in order to do their job, must use a combination of the evidence, and their own knowledge and life experience? And while everyone will have different knowledge and life experiences, the twelve members of the jury are supposed to provide a representative cross-section of the knowledge and experience of all of the population. If you exclude the knowledge of some portions of the population, then the jury is no longer representing the people as a whole.
Well, no, because jurors don’t get to make objections in jury selection. A juror may have given a reason to not serve, but if you watch voir dire you’ll notice that, usually, the judge doesn’t just excuse people right away even after they’ve given a really good reason to not serve (unless it’s an emergency like “I’m having physical issues right now”).
Instead, after voir dire, the judge will remove all of the potential jurors from the courtroom and then decide with the lawyers who to exclude. Then they bring everybody back in and announce their selections.
This is because only the lawyers (or the court, on its own initiative) can excuse a juror for cause. It’s also because if one person raises their hand and gets dismissed right away, there’s a big risk that suddenly a bunch of other possible jurors (who might have better things to do with their time) suddenly have the same excuse.
(The Trump trial jury selection is not typical of how I’ve seen it done. But that’s for good reason, given how famous the defendant is and how well publicized the allegations).
It has to be supported by the record. Is his education out of line with the other jurors? Did you tell the court you saw him not paying attention? There has to be something identifiable.
If all you can allege is that the black jurors have “beady eyes”, you won’t survive a Batson challenge. Or the case will be overturned on appeal.
Huh.
I’ve sat through the selection process for two trials, though wasn’t chosen for either one. And that’s not the way they did it at all. (New York State; one course to be heard in Town court, the other in County court.)
They brought up a batch of people at a time and asked each of them a batch of questions; then either excused or sat each of them; then if the jury box wasn’t full (which it wasn’t for several rounds in either case) they brought up some more people, asked questions, either excused or sat each one. The rest of the potential jury pool was in the room the whole time (though the excused people left). Sometimes the judge and lawyers conferred, quietly, so we couldn’t hear them; or did so with a particular candidate if they had an issue they wanted to keep private.
That’s not how it worked in either of the trials where I got that far, either.
In the one where I was selected, they called up a batch of jurors, and questioned them one at a time, and accepted or dismissed them one at a time. In my case, because I lived near the precinct the dirty cops worked in, they specifically asked me if I went there and if I had fears for my safety if I were to serve. Other jurors could have heard that and raised a similar concern. In that case, we could all hear each other’s answers.
In the one where I was dismissed, the judge asked me a very open-ended question about my availability, and I brought up the conflict with Passover and he walked me through how to phrase that to make it a legally valid excuse. In that case, the questioning was done quietly, and far enough from the jurors waiting to serve that most probably didn’t hear the Q&A. But I pretty much brought up the objection. Anyone who had surgery, or whatever, would have been similarly dismissed on the spot based on their concerns.
My husband was once dismissed based on his answer to a question he was asked about believing police testimony, and he cast doubt on the testimony of the cops so convincingly that every other juror who could hear the exchange was also dismissed. That was in the same county as my trial.
I suspect these details very a great deal by court.
I’ve never seen it done this way. Interesting. All the jury panels I’ve been on/was called for had the attornies make their exclusions. Sometimes it was right after voir dire on a particular juror, but the last panel I was on, I was questioned twice, with other jurors being voir dire’d in between, and about an hour later, the judge asked if both sides were satisfied with the jury as it was, and the defense then excused me.
ETA: This was in SoCal.
I’ve served on a couple of juries-- rape, attempted rape, drugs, damages because someone was in a car wreck and developed tinnitus . . .
I’ve seen several varieties of questioning-- in several cases, they asked questions mostly of the whole pool, and then apparently drew numbers or otherwise sorted out the actual jury and then dismissed the rest.
In other situations-- especially when they were asking about people’s opinions and experiences with things like drugs or rape or the criminal justice system, they’d ask several questions in a row and then give people a chance to talk to the judge (possibly with lawyers) one at a time.
And then give another open ended one person at a time opportunity later. So people who thought of something late or who were embarrassed or whatever had a less obvious chance to talk.
In situations where I didn’t serve on the jury, I never had any indication of why I might not have been selected.
The most recent time I was called for jury duty, which was a few years ago (just before the pandemic, actually), the judge did it this way:
After the pool was assembled in the courtroom, and after a few preliminaries were done with, the judge said that everybody with a possible hardship excuse should remain and he would hear them one at a time. Everyone else was excused until the next day.
The next day the actual voir dire started with the remaining jurors. I didn’t end up getting picked.