If you'll need to select a jury in the next several months, but you can't work on voir dire questions right now, here's a strategy that might be helpful. Start building a personal collection of juror questionnaires.
They're easy to find. If you set up standing Internet news searches for "juror questionnaire" and "jury questionnaire," you'll hear about high-profile cases where the jurors had to respond to a pretrial questionnaire. Unless the questionnaire is sealed, it's a public document -- available on PACER in federal court, and often through court or newspaper sites in state court.
What to do when you find them
If you're swamped on the day you find a questionnaire, just throw it in a file. But if you have a minute, look it over, just long enough to think: What is interesting here? What might I do differently? What questions am I surprised to see the judge allowed? How would I respond to questions like this?
When the time comes to prepare your own voir dire questions, pull out your collection. They'll serve as a brainstorming checklist for your own trial. (Does this question translate to something useful for me?) In addition, you'll find that the moments you spent thinking about jury selection as you printed off the questionnaires will have laid the ground for some surprisingly useful thinking when you get to work.
Here's a start
This week there are at least two questionnaires to get you started. The questionnaire in the Conrad Black fraud trial was posted here on Tuesday. And the questionnaire in the Phil Spector trial is in several places on the Web, including here.
The Spector questionnaire is worth studying even you'll never try a murder case. Look, for example, at:
- The way it encourages jurors to offer substantive answers. The traditional wisdom is that you ask open-ended questions, but this questionnaire is full of multiple-choice and yes-or-no questions. As you read them, you'll see that if these questions were open-ended, many jurors would answer with silence. Given choices, it seems more likely that jurors responded.
- The strategies it uses to explore bias. We often don't know we're biased, and when we do, we don't like to admit it. So the Spector questionnaire asks not only about bias, but also about the behaviors that reveal bias: what jurors may have said to others about the case, for example, and what organizations they donate to. And it asks a very wise question: how a guilty or not guilty vote would be viewed by a juror's friends and family. We may not be very good at reporting our own biases, but we're clearer on those of the people around us.
None of these techniques are limited to a written questionnaire. Whether you adopt them or not, your jury selection will be better because you thought about them.
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Follow-up on yesterday's post on storytelling: many thanks to Judge Rick Sankovitz for his instructive comment. Judges see the best and worst of trial advocacy, so it makes sense that many of them teach it so well.
(Photo by Korean Resource Center at http://www.flickr.com/photos/krcla/362137815/; license details there.)
