While it is too soon to know how these changes (the Covid-19 pandemic) will affect juror decision-making and verdicts, we know that plaintiffs’ attorneys can strengthen their cases by recognizing these changes and embracing society’s shared experiences in this time of crisis. This pandemic provides opportunities to explore critical topics in voir dire to assist in evaluating jurors for peremptory and cause challenges.
In this roundtable discussion, four prominent experts explore the opportunities and challenges facing jury consultants today.
We’ve found that anti-Arab […] Muslim prejudice comes in a variety of forms. Some of it stems from perceptions that all Arabs and Muslims are terrorists. Some of it comes from personal experiences that jurors have had with Arabs or Muslims at work or in stores owned by Arabs or Muslims. Other jurors believe that Christianity is in a Holy War with Muslims.
The old school of thought was the plaintiff should be in the courtroom to show jurors the lawsuit was important enough to the plaintiff to show up to court. A more recent trend is to keep the plaintiff out of the courtroom to focus jurors’ attention on the defendant’s wrongful conduct and to keep the spotlight off the plaintiff.
Public records, Google, and social media sites have become common sources to gather information about prospective jurors to assess bias in addition to what is learned in voir dire or when voir dire conditions are limited, such as in federal court. This research can be labor-intensive and expensive. However, technology can streamline the process by doing these searches in a matter of minutes.
We in California live in a highly diverse state, in an increasingly diverse nation, and yet jury pools often do not adequately reflect the population.
Since jury selection involves interacting with a group of people who would generally rather remain silent, sending the right signal about your expectations can make a critical difference in getting the information you need to assess juror bias.
Death qualification eliminates a broad swath of jurors from the pool; jurors who have come to believe that the death penalty is not without bias, not just, nor fair, brutal in its application, and irreversibly error prone.
A mini-opening is a brief statement – usually in the range of 5–7 minutes – that describes the context of the dispute, provides a quick overview of the key issues in the case, and gives a “50,000 foot” description of what the jurors will be asked to decide. The basic concept is quite simple: when jurors are given a coherent statement about the case at the outset of voir dire they can do a better job of identifying the issues that may make it difficult for them to be impartial and of revealing any prior attitudes or experiences related to the specific issues in dispute.
Research demonstrates that noncompliance with restrictions on Internet access is a potential problem across almost all age groups. To get “wired” jurors to cooperate, we need to look at not only how jury instructions are framed but also how other aspects of the trial process should be adjusted.
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