I have a question about the law - in particular, why are attorneys allowed to disqualify potential jurors without giving justification during voir dire? I understand why jurors who seem potentially biased may be dismissed, but how is the cause of having an impartial jury furthered by permitting attorneys to do so without justification? Doesn’t it just make it easier to stack a jury unfairly? The way the system works now, it takes a great deal of investigation to determine if a lawyer unjustly stacked the jury on racial lines, for instance.
This sort of thing varies between jurisdictions, but generally, both the prosecutor and the defense are allowed to reject a pre-determined number of jurors at will. It’s a bit of a gamble; you might use up all your rejections getting rid of jerks, only to realize that now you’re stuck with a real rat bastard.
The theory goes that since both sides get an equal number of rejections, in the end, the make-up of the jury should skew towards the middle.
In Florida at least (and I suspect other jurisdictions are similar), attorneys on each side have a certain amount of challenges for cause during voir dire, which means they can strike someone who falls asleep, or claims to be biased, or is just rude and uncooperative. Then they each get a smaller number of peremptory challenges, which means they can strike someone for ANY reason. However, these reasons are not allowed to be race- or gender-based, and the opposing party or the judge can object if something looks suspicious. Aside from that, peremptory challengers allow the attorneys to “trust their gut,” and if they get a bad feeling about someone, they can strike him. Sometimes it can make all the difference!
I would be surprised if there were any jurisdiction that purported to limit challenges for cause. A trial by an impartial jury is a Constitutional right, and if a juror is biased, the mere fact that a side had run out of a set number of challenges will not permit that juror to be seated.
Premptory challenges, on the other hand, are limited.
The seminal case for racial challenges is Batson v. Kentucky.
Batson mandates the procedure to be followed: if one side believes that the other is challenging jurors for impermissible reasons, they bring this to the attention of the trial judge. They must make a prima facie case that the challenges are racially based. If the judge finds that a prima facie case is made, the burden then shifts to the other side to provide a race-neutral explanation. The trial judge then ultimately makes a determination, based on his evaluation of the credibility of the explanations, and imposes an appropriate remedy.
Ok, so I get the basics of how it works. But why preemptory challenges at all? Why should attorneys get to just dismiss a certain number without explaining why? If there’s not a good reason for a dismissal, why do they still get to do it? I mean, is there some overarching legal purpose to it that I’m missing here?