An art or a scourge? You be the judge;
Jury consultants hail from a variety of fields—business, law, marketing, communications, theater, statistics, but especially psychology. About half of all trial consultants are psychologists. Work can begin months before a trial with community surveys. Consultants may cold-call random people from the local phone book and ask them questions about their age, race, gender, religion, profession, and political views. Then they ask about their views on issues pertaining to the case and maybe their reactions to a brief case description. They’re looking for correlations between the two sets of answers.
Next they’ll pay a small number of people to participate in focus groups, where they actually test parts of their case—particular arguments, pieces of evidence, or witnesses. That furnishes detail on how different types of jurors react. On occasion consultants stage full mock trials with the lawyers and actors and then scrutinize the “jurors” as they deliberate.
Armed with a sense of which issues and which juror characteristics matter most to the trial, consultants draw up juror questionnaires and devise strategies for voir dire. Some question topics are straightforward: family, education, experiences with the justice system. Some are highly detailed: The questionnaire for the 2004 Kobe Bryant rape case asked, “How do you feel about interracial relationships?”, “Which of the following best describes your opinion of professional basketball players?”, and “Describe your exposure [to this case from each of the following media outlets].” Forms usually run a few pages, but can be much longer in big cases; the questionnaire in the O.J. trial ran 75 pages, with more than 300 questions.
h/t Maggies Farm
That reminds me of a book I read about Morgenthaler as his case wound its way to the Supreme Court. Sure, he was acquitted (more than once) by a jury of his peers. Those juries were hand-picked to intentionally exclude anyone who had qualms about abortion, as though holding views on a particular issue makes a person ineligible to make a decision as to whether a particular person was guilty of breaking a particular law. The article you reference seems like it’s part of that ‘jury-grooming’ process. I think it’s a travesty of justice that people aren’t just tried by an ordinary set of ones peers.
This is getting so far away from the intentions of trial by jury, it would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.
Maybe it’s time to computerize it. Or maybe just do away with the whole schemozzle, and go with a coin toss, heads you’re guilty, tails you walk. Hell of a lot cheaper, although devastating to the “justice” industry. Some lawyer somewhere, would figure a way to “fix” the coin toss.
It doesn’t surprise me that the “legal industry” and the burgeoning “jurocracy” will do everything that can to eiter neuter or eradicate the jury system from our legal processes.
There is no greater elitist sandbox that that of the legal/judicial community. From where I sit the jury system is the last control the common citizen has on an insulated, unaccountable jurocracy. After hearing the threatening and coersive instructions to jurors by what I consider to be a rogue judical class, we need to fight tenaciously for this right to judgement by peers.
This industry of psyche profiling a jury to meet the needs of a client amounts to jury tampering, breech of due process and obstruction of justice.
The only requirement needed of a juror is to be undecided in the case before them….tossing jurors for frivilous perceptions of their “psychological/political” makeup is the worst type of jury tampering.
If they distrust the word of jurors so much they allow the inprecise voodoo science of psychology to determine the worth of a juror, we may as well give them lie detector tests and go through thousands of citizens to find 12 totally impartial people in Canada and make them a permanent court fixture…one chosen they will be the ONLY impartial people in the court as the mook behind the bench isnt…but noone cal “challenge” the judge’s impartiality.
this was all done in the gene hackman movie ‘runaway jury’.
life imitating art eh?
‘justice for sale! justice for sale! extra, extra, read all about it! justice for sale!!!’
LOL !!!
ah for the ‘good old days’ !!! LOL !!!
Well, now I know how to get out of jury duty. Thanks.