As soon as jury bloggers rule the world, we're going to make a law that there can only be one extravaganza trial going on at a time. Somebody declared this Prosecute The Rich And Famous Week, and I have to say it's challenging.
Get your voir dire questions here: the Conrad Black jury questionnaire
You have Lord Conrad Black on trial in Chicago, as every breathing Canadian knows. Last week I wrote about the jurors' reported answers to the court's 45-page pretrial questionnaire, and now I can post the questionnaire itself here.
The Black questionnaire is a useful study guide for any lawyer who is planning a first or second voir dire, or who could use a reminder checklist for a tenth or twentieth. Of many points to note from it, here are a few starters:
- Voir dire isn't a list. It's a thought process followed by a human exchange. The Black questionnaire is clearly the product of brainstorming, not rote. When you want to know the jurors' experience with lawyers and the court system, you need to think about what events in their lives would have given them that experience. So this list asks whether jurors have ever been parties to a lawsuit, whether they have regular business dealings with lawyers, how many lawyers they know fairly well, and whether they've ever been employed by a law office, as well as asking about their contacts with the criminal system.
- Remember their loved ones. A juror's attitudes are shaped as strongly by what has happened to her husband, mother, or best friend as by what has happened to her personally. This questionnaire asks over and over about "you or anyone close to you."
- Look for the juror experts. The questionnaire asks, "Have you or anyone close to you received training, education or had work experience in any of the following fields," and then lists every topic the lawyers could think of where jurors might seek each other's advice in deliberations: accounting, bookkeeping, finance, prisons and correctional facilities, shareholder's rights, banking, the media, business, law enforcement, stock brokerage, and real estate.
- Look for claims made. The questionnaire asks about claims the jurors, or anyone close to them, have made, formally or informally. I don't have data for this at hand, but our mock trials have suggested that jurors who have brought any kind of claim against someone else, or had to defend against one, often have very strong feelings about the "blame" that any trial involves.
Live blogging Qwest -- fast
Then you have Joseph Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest, defending insider trading charges in Denver. His lawyer is former judge and star trial advocacy teacher Herbert Stern, whose strong views on jury selection are collected in this Denver Post article from Sunday. ("Don't be charming. Don't be clever. Don't be quick. Don't be brilliant. Just be right.")
Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft is in Denver too, and she beautifully live blogged the jury selection yesterday for 5280 magazine in three posts starting here. If you're new at this, one learning point from this "transcript" is how fast it goes. Merritt herself missed a motion to strike for cause, and all she was doing was typing. As you read it, imagine what you would jot down, what you might not bother noting, and how you would set up your notes chart so you could find what you wrote when it was time to choose.
Sex, guns, and Phil Spector
If corporate finance isn't your thing, then the voir dire for you is in Los Angeles, where they are picking the jury in Phil Spector's murder trial. So far the photographers seem to have elbowed out the live bloggers, so all I know is that Spector has a calm new hairstyle.
(Image by Victoria Peckham at http://www.flickr.com/photos/victoriapeckham/164175205/; license details there.)
