The New York Times has an article this morning that could kill the day for anyone interested in juries: the headline is "Across the Great Divide: Investigating Links Between Personality and Politics." The author, Patricia Cohen, discusses recent studies exploring links (and missing links) between personality and political leaning, but she could as easily be talking about likely juror leanings. The first paragraph perfectly describes how a muddled lawyer feels trying to plan a first voir dire:
Folk music and a collection of feminist poetry may well be dead giveaways that there is a liberal [or a sympathetic juror] in the house. But what about an ironing board or postage stamps or a calendar?
The bottom line is that there is a wealth of research worth tracking down, and that the results are disputed and sometimes ridiculed.
What it's worth, and not worth
For lawyers, there's another bottom line (the bottom bottom line?): all the research in the world, however sound, cannot definitively tell you what the statistically insignificant sample of people in the box will do -- not as individuals, and definitely not when they are sitting around a table with the exact group of other jurors sharing the box.
So why read it? Because it will, working together with your own experience, begin to shape and hone your sense of how a juror brings her entire personality to the courtroom and how that personality works as part of a group. Research like this, and the exercise of deciding whether you agree with it or not, helps shape your intuition -- which, standing in front of that box, is all you have.
