This came up on another GD -about whether the jury for Mumia Abul Jamal was racially balanced and implications of same that it wasn’t and so he didn’t get a fair trail.
Should things like your race, your profession, what your friends or family members do for a living, or your opinion about the death penalty, gun control or violence on TV be a valid consideration?
Should selection be essentially at random? That is, should the jury be the first six or twelve people called as long as there is no direct connection, no physical or mental limitation or some more or less objective limiting factor?
The current system favors “stacking” the jury and the perception (or misperception) seems to be that guilt or innocence is secondary or tertiary to the judicial process. (Which is another issues entirely).
So is our current system of selection good, bad or indifferent?
Against stupidity, the very Gods themselves contend in vain - F. Schiller
I haven’t been following the thread you refer to, nor am I any sort of legal expert.
But it seems to me that our current system of jury selection is inadequate.
What with ‘jury selection’ becoming a science amongst legal specialists, those with the dollars to pay for such specialists are gaining an advantage over those who aren’t so wealthy.
Interesting question, though. Maybe some legal brains will step in here and explain things to us.
I’ve been thinking of this myself, as I’m about to voir dire a jury for a trial next week. (“Voir dire” is the process by which lawyers and/or judges question potential jurors and empanel a jury.)
I think it depends. (This, BTW, is almost always a safe answer to legal questions.) A potential juror can be removed from consideration for service by three methods: he or she can ask to be excused (judges vary in their willingness to excuse people, but most will accept any reasonable excuse because an unwilling, resentful juror is not a good juror); he or she can be removed for cause; or he or she can be removed via a pre-emptory challenge. A pre-emptory challenge is basically an opportunity for the lawyer for a side to remove a juror without having to say why – he or she is just bounced, no questions asked. In my jurisdiction (state court), each side gets four preemptory challenges. I think a juror’s opinion on issues such as the death penalty or gun control would have obvious ramifications in a criminal, gun-violence case, for example. If you, as attorney for the state, wished to pursue the death penalty in a case, you obviously would not want jurors who were vehemently anti-death-penalty – including people who feel so strongly that they avow they will set the defendant free (acquit him) before exposing him to that potential punishment – and I have personally seen this, though I don’t do death-penalty cases (or even criminal law) myself. By the same token, many lawyers do not like to have lawyers on the jury, because they either see the case too clearly (from a legal standpoint) or they don’t see it clearly enough (focusing on the trial lawyers’ performance and procedural issues instead of the guts of the case). Also, they tend to dominate the jury because of their presumed greater knowledge of the law.
All these factors, and other similar ones, might affect a defendant’s (or a plaintiff’s) right to a fair, impartial jury. The questions are intended to winnow out people who could not or would not be fair or impartial – even those who personally think they could be. (For example, I do not like to have union people on juries involving employment cases with my employer, the State. They think they are fair and impartial, but they almost invariably favor the employer from the outset – regardless of the facts – and cast the State as the evil oppressor. They think they are impartial; I do not.) That all said, I personally don’t know how much good voir dire does, and how much is just the lawyers fooling themselves into thinking they can read people and judge them based on a few questions.
It’s worth noting, also, that the courts have held that attorneys may not use pre-emptory challenges to strike people on the basis of race or gender. It’s also worth noting that the lawyers don’t get to question prospective jurors in Federal court – only the judge does that.
Whew. What a long-winded way to say “I’m not sure.”