Deliberations

The Case Of The Troubled Jury Foreman

The trial judge thought it was merely glossophobia.

Eric Turkewitz passed on this story from Thomas Swartz's New York Legal Update, on a February 21 New York appellate opinion, People v. Figueroa.  The trial itself in Figueroa's robbery case apparently went smoothly -- but after the jury sent word that it had reached a verdict, something unusual happened. "The foreperson sent a personal note to the [trial] court indicating that he did not feel 'comfortable' about reading the verdict," the appellate court explained.

Please don't make me read aloud

What does a trial judge do with a note like that?  Talk to the juror.  This trial judge did that, and concluded the problem was simple stage fright:

The court inquired of the foreperson about the meaning of the note, outside the presence of defendant, his codefendant or any of the attorneys. Subsequently, the court informed counsel of the note, and related that during the inquiry, no mention of the verdict itself was made; instead, the foreperson stated that he was uneasy about having to read the verdict out loud in some sort of narrative form. The court related to counsel that when it assured the foreperson he would only have to answer the clerk's questions, the foreperson, who had not served on a jury before, was "relieved" and satisfied. In response to the prosecutor's question, the court stated that the foreperson never indicated any discomfort with the verdict itself, which was simply not discussed.

That put things back on track, or seemed to:  "Neither defendant objected to this procedure or sought a further inquiry of the foreperson. The jury then rendered its verdict, and, when individually polled, each juror including the foreperson agreed with it."

So the trial judge was probably surprised when, in postverdict motions, Figueroa claimed juror coercion.  He filed the foreman's "affidavit, which was obviously drafted by an attorney, in which he claimed that other jurors had coerced his verdict, and that he had communicated to the court that this was why he was uncomfortable announcing the verdict."  But the juror in turn recanted that testimony in a postverdict hearing and went back to the stage-fright version, so the conviction was upheld.

Of course there's a Glossophobia.com

Can stage fright really make a juror afraid to read a verdict out loud?  To find the answer, you'd of course start at Glossophobia.com, and find that even those smooth-talking airplane pilots get stage fright:

Glossophobia can exhibit itself in many ways, including:

• Actors, actresses and musicians finding shows and concerts extremely difficult
• Businesspeople having a fear of making presentations
• The fear of making speeches at weddings
• The fear in anticipation of a public speaking event
• The avoidance of situations that might include public speaking
• Pilots and cabin crew feeling intensely uncomfortable having to make announcements to passengers during a flight
• Stuttering or stammering in public speaking situations

The prevalence and power of this fear are worth remembering in voir dire, especially attorney-conducted voir dire when you're the one making someone speak in front of a group.  There's a chance your simplest question is making someone queasy.  That's not the first impression you want to make.  Watch for glossophobia, and find ways to show compassion.

(Image from www.moviewallpapers.net posted by Mickey Glitter at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mickey_glitter/2081677243/; license details at both sites.)

How To Popularize Jury Duty In One Easy Step

Let's say you want to make as many Americans as possible use the phrase "jury duty" in a sentence on the same day.  Do you:

1.  Issue a colorful new jury duty postage stamp, with ceremony and fanfare?

2.  Introduce a bill that would exempt nursing mothers from jury duty, causing the world to wonder why they were ever required to go in the first place?

3.  Release a major poll on Americans' attitudes toward jury duty?

or

4.  Subpoena Madonna for jury duty, and time it so that she'll show up only a few hours after her Academy Awards party breaks up, looking fabulous in "dark brown velour Juicy Couture sweatsuit, sunglasses, tennis shoes and an oh-so-glam Juror badge."  (That's from breathless TMZ on the scene.)

It's #4, of course.  I'm not sure why we're so fascinated with celebrity jury duty; it must be because it's a moment when the stars' lives are a little like ours.  My feed reader includes a standing search for "jury duty," and when Madonna or Jennifer Lopez or Brad Pitt or Jimmy Johnson or even NASCAR driver Jamie McMurray go to court, I'm flooded with stories. 

Maybe there's an angle here for courts dealing with reluctant jurors.  I wonder how many celebrity jurors we would need before people lined up outside the courthouse asking to be allowed to serve.

(Photo by Philipp Naderer at http://www.flickr.com/photos/triotex/426476914/; license details there.)

Taking On False Confessions

False confessions.  Two words that capsulize just how tough a criminal defense lawyer's task can be.

No wonder they talk about it so much.  In the last few days alone, a public defender and Simple Justice have traded thoughts on whether videotaping interrogations prevents false confessions or merely records them, and Grits for Breakfast points to a defendant who falsely confessed to murder after long questioning in which he was threatened with the death penalty if he didn't confess. 

There's a new book that brings evidence and history to these conversations, and to the briefs criminal defense lawyers must file when clients confess under pressure.  It's Police Interrogation And American Justice, by University of San Francisco law professor Richard Leo, published by Harvard University Press.

"A systematic feature of American criminal justice"

Here is what lawyers, judges, and the public need to know, grounded in study after study.  False confessions not only happen, but they happen commonly:

The problem of false confession is not limited to a small number of cases.  These studies reveal that false confessions are therefore not an anomaly but a systematic feature of American criminal justice, despite procedural safeguards such as Miranda rights and a constitutional prohibition against legally coercive interrogation techniques.  . . . Unless police change their procedures for selecting suspects and their interrogation practices, false confessions will continue to occur regularly.

How can this be true in 2008?  Leo explains that the problem isn't that we haven't progressed from the days of bright lights and the third degree.  To the contrary, sadly, the problem is that we have progressed.  Leo narrates the development of increasingly sophisticated techniques of police interrogation, techniques that manage to break down a defendant's psychological defenses and build a detailed and compelling story for the jury at the same time. 

"A dangerous piece of evidence"

And it matters, of course.  You didn't need studies to know that, but Leo gathers the studies all the same.  False confessions mean mistaken convictions:

Taken together these studies demonstrate that a false confession is a dangerous piece of evidence to put before a judge or jury because it profoundly biases their evaluations of the case in favor of conviction -- so much so that they will allow it to outweigh even strong evidence of a suspect's innocence.  . . . Jurors simply do not appropriately discount false-confession evidence, even when the defendant's confession was elicted by coercive methods and the other case evidence strongly supports his innocence.  False-confession  evidence is thus highly, if not inherently, prejudicial to the fate of any innocent defendant in the American criminal justice system.

There are briefs to be written out of this book.  If enough of them win, the reforms Leo proposes in his final chapter might begin to take hold.

_____________________

Note:  As often happens, forensic psychologist Karen Franklin's excellent "In The News" blog was well ahead of me in discussing Leo's book.

A New Questionnaire, And The Impression It Makes

Here's a new proposed jury questionnaire for Deliberations's collection, from the upcoming federal corruption trial of former Orange County, California sheriff Mike Corona, his mistress, and his wife. 

The questions

You'd think that a case with that cast of characters might have few stipulations, but it looks like the defense is submitting questions jointly, and even the government agrees to some of them.  The proposed questions touch on infidelity, profanity, boat ownership, business gifts, and the racial controversy raised by Hurricane Katrina, among many other topics.  There's a remarkable list of almost eighty agree-or-disagree questions probing jurors' attitudes.  Many judges wouldn't put all those in a questionnaire, but they make a great voir dire checklist. 

The impression

Even better, this questionnaire comes with its own newspaper article.  When a newspaper features a jury questionnaire, the result is not only entertaining (this one is a lot of fun) but informative for trial lawyers.  The reporter is doing what your jurors will be doing:  trying to figure out why on earth you're asking these questions, and making judgments about you based on the questions you've asked.  If a reporter says your questionnaire "seems like a survey on 'Cinemax After Dark,'" some juror may be saying that too.

(Photo by Korean Resource Center at http://www.flickr.com/photos/krcla/362137815/; license details there.)

Juries, The Blog

There's a new jury blog, a good one.  Since January 2, University of Dayton law professor Thaddeus Hoffmeister has been writing about juries at a blog called, yes, Juries.  Recent topics include:

• The Florida Supreme Court's better-than-Batson system for questioning peremptory challenges;
• What happens when a famous NASCAR driver shows up for jury duty;
• The arrival of juries in South Korea;
• Whether San Diego should do a better job recruiting Hispanic jurors.

Like the wonderful weekly Jur-E-Bulletin, Prof. Hoffmeister primarily explores the way judges and court systems handle the jury process.  It's good stuff, and well worth adding to your blog subscriptions.

(Photo by Michel Verburg at http://www.flickr.com/photos/michelos/1015826394/; license details there.)

Bringing Unconscious Bias Out Of The Dark

Last week I wrote about the troubling study suggesting that "many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes."  Commenter Roy Wilson asked for a constructive response:  "Any thoughts about this topic in relation to jury composition as it might affect deliberation?"

I do have a thought -- not an answer, but a thought.  More accurately, Tufts professor Samuel R. Sommers has a thought, explained in his 2006 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  The thought is:  jury diversity.  Prof. Sommers's research suggests that diversity in the jury itself can bring unconscious biases out of the shadows.

Diverse juries, better juries

In the study described in the paper, Prof. Sommers and his colleagues recruited enough people to make up 29 separate six-person juries.  (Unlike many university-based psychological studies, this one used jury-eligible adults from the community, not college students.)  Some of the juries included only white jurors; the rest were composed of four white jurors and two black jurors.  Each jury listened to a Court TV summary of a sexual-assault trial of a black defendant. 

When the groups deliberated about the summarized trial, the diverse groups performed far better.  They raised and discussed more of the evidence they had seen.  They mentioned more "missing" evidence, things they had not seen that they thought would have been helpful.  And they were more willing to mention, and discuss, the possible role of racism in the case.

Discussing what's uncomfortable

Most striking, it wasn't only the black jurors who added to the discussion in the diverse juries.  Instead, the white jurors were more willing to raise and discuss issues when the black jurors were there.  On the topic of racism, for example, Sommers quotes several exchanges from his juries, and concludes: 

Participants in all-White groups seemed surprised at and were made uncomfortable by the mention of racism during deliberations. Perhaps they had given little thought to racial issues to that point in the experiment. True, the defendant was a Black man, but race was not discussed during the trial, nor would a cursory look around the room suggest that such a potentially controversial issue would be brought up during deliberations. Whites in diverse groups, on the other hand, reacted differently. They did not automatically change the topic when racism came up, but rather engaged in substantive conversation about it. Members of diverse groups did disagree while deliberating, at times vociferously, but they devoted time to discussing even polarizing and uncomfortable topics.

It rings true, of course; you've seen it happen yourself.  When you're talking to a person of another race, you're more conscious of racial context, overtones, and issues.  Diversity works like a flashlight.  It may not cure racism, but it can bring racial biases out where we can talk about them.

_____________

Notes:

1. Prof. Sommers has spent the last several years studying race and juries.  I wrote here on his paper on purportedly "race-neutral" peremptory challeges under Batson; his other papers are linked to, in full, on his Tufts bio page.  Thanks to him and Tufts for that.
2. Not surprisingly, diverse juries are also perceived as more fair and legitimate by the public than all-white or all-black juries are.  Northwestern professor Shari Seidman Diamond and Dr. Leslie Ellis (now of TrialGraphix) showed that in their paper "Race, Diversity, and Jury Composition:  Battering and Bolstering Legitimacy," in the Chicago-Kent Law Review in 2003. 
3. So does Batson let you strike white jurors in the name of a diverse jury?  Don't expect a case on point soon, but probably not.  Another obstacle on the Batson collision course.
4. Related posts here:

• Batson, Day To Day
• Another Day, Another Unconscious Bias Study
• A Helpful Way To Think About Race.

(Photo by Dan at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ladnlins/1822774622/; license details there.)

Walk This Way

If you want to get better at persuasion, maybe you should practice imitating other people. 

Anything that increases the common ground and reduces the distance between you and the other person is a good thing.  And the quickest way to accomplish this it so synchronize as many of the other person's aspects as you can -- adopt the same attitude, make the same motions and speak the same way.

There's some good jury learning in self-help books.  That quote is from Nicholas Boothman's How To Make People Like You In 90 Seconds Or Less, and before you unsubscribe to a blogger who would own such a thing, read Benedict Carey's article "You Remind Me Of Me," in the science section of tomorrow's New York Times.  It turns out that research supports this idea:

Psychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century, analyzing activities like political propaganda, television campaigns and door-to-door sales. . . . They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.

Toe-tapping their way to higher sales

Mothers unconsciously imitate babies, friends unconsciously imitate friends -- but conscious imitation is powerful too.  Carey describes a number of studies, including this one by Duke researchers Robin Tanner and Tanya Chartrand: 

The team had 37 Duke students try out what was described as a new sports drink, Vigor, and answer a few questions about it. The interviewer mimicked about half the participants using a technique Dr. Chartrand had developed in earlier studies.

The technique involved mirroring a person’s posture and movements, with a one- to two-second delay. If he crosses his legs, then wait two seconds and do the same, with opposite legs. If she touches her face, wait a beat or two and do that. If he drums his fingers or taps a toe, wait again and do something similar. . . .

None of the copied participants picked up on the mimicry. But by the end of the short interview, they were significantly more likely than the others to consume the new drink, to say they would buy it and to predict its success in the market.

"A delicate balance"

But wait, you say.  I won't do it right, and I'll get caught.  It's true; you might, especially if you jump on the other person's gestures too quickly.  The article continues:

Dr. [Jeremy] Bailenson, the Stanford psychologist, has been testing the effects of different forms of mimicry by programming a computer-generated figure, an avatar, to mirror the movements and gestures of people in a study.

He has found that his subjects pick up the mimicry when it is immediate and precise. If the avatar is slightly out of sync, however — waits four seconds, for instance — then the mimicking goes unnoticed, and the usual rules apply. The virtual creating comes across as warm and convincing, as if controlled by another human.

“The point is it’s a delicate balance to get it right, and I suspect that people who are good at this know how to do it intuitively,” Dr. Bailenson said.

Too much to remember

It's all fascinating, but does it mean you should add mimicry to your list of trial skills?  Probably not, unless you're already a natural at it.  Most obviously, whether conscious or unconscious, it's a way that one person relates to another.  It wouldn't make sense to mirror six or twelve people.  And there's far too much else to remember in trial.

A more modest, goal, though, is worth striving for.  Two or three times during your next trial, or next anything, try to notice a gesture or posture that you could mirror.  You'll probably be surprised at how difficult this is.  The thing that keeps us from doing it is the same thing that keeps us from connecting better with jurors:  we're too wrapped up in ourselves.  You'll be planning your next sentence, or thinking about your last meeting, and suddenly you'll realize that for the last several minutes you've hardly known whether the other person's eyes are open.

Anything that makes you notice will make you better -- and this is fun.  Try it.

____________

Note:  What a relief.  For years I thought I'd never remember the punch line that responds to the old line "Walk this way."  Riddle solved; there are more than a dozen, used over decades, and they're catalogued in Wikipedia from "After The Thin Man" to "M*A*S*H" to "Rugrats."

(Image by Jim Crossley at http://www.flickr.com/photos/raindog/10550156/; license details there.)

A Year of Blogging

A year ago yesterday, I wrote a timid little post about the Scooter Libby trial, to see what a blog might look like.  The next day, I wrote another post.  Then I wrote one I really liked.  And that was it for me.

It really did change my life.  Since last February, I've:

• Learned volumes more than anybody has learned from me;
• Been honored with inclusions in the ABA Journal Blawg 100, Blawg Review's "Simply the Best" list, and some dizzyingly flattering posts by blogging colleagues;
• Been quoted in terrific stories in the National Law Journal and the ABA Journal;
• Become a regular guest on Milwaukee Public Radio's local current affairs show Lake Effect, and a regular blogger in the Wisconsin Law Journal;
• Turned 50;
• Lost an awful lot of sleep; and
• Run up debts of gratitude I'll likely never be able to repay, to new friends I've never met.  To Eric Turkewitz (the first person to cite me), Scott Greenfield, Mark Bennett, Gideon, David Giacalone, Blawg Review's anonymous Ed. (I think I'm the only person who doesn't know who he is), Susan Cartier Liebel, Victoria Pynchon, Michael Connelly of the late and very lamented Corrections Sentencing, Barry Barnett, Pat Lamb (okay, him I know), Dan Hull and Holden Oliver, Walter Olson, Carolyn Elefant, Kevin O'Keefe, Emma Barrett, Anne Skove, Jamie Spencer, Karl Keys, Dave Hoffman and Dan Solove, Stephen Gustitis, the ASTC's Dennis Elias, and the many others who showed me generosity and kindness, please know that I'm really grateful.

(Calendar by Eliazar Parra Cardenas at http://www.flickr.com/photos/eliazar/407591133/; license details there.)

What You're Up Against

"[M]any Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes."

I often have fun translating social science research into something lawyers can read, but the press release for "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," in the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, doesn't need translation.  What it needs is courage, a steady calm while you try to absorb what this is telling you.

The researchers -- Stanford's Jennifer Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State's Phillip Atiba Goff, and grad students Matthew Jackson and Melissa Williams, did six separate studies, which this paper compiles.  I don't have the paper itself, so this is from the press release:

--"In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to 'prime' the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces."

--"The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other non-white groups, such as Asians."

--"In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white male undergraduates with words associated with either apes (such as 'monkey,' 'chimp,' 'gorilla') or big cats (such as 'lion,' 'tiger,' 'panther'). The latter was used as a control because both images are associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt said. The subjects then watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. A mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a description conveying that, although described by his family as 'a loving husband and father,' the suspect had a serious criminal record and may have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest. . . .  The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was. Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either ape or big cat words, Eberhardt said. But those who thought the suspect was black were more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat words."

--"[T]he paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, African Americans convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant language, such as 'barbaric,' 'beast,' 'brute,' 'savage' and 'wild.' 'Those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not,' the researchers write."

Voir dire won't help you on this.  We're talking about something jurors wouldn't unearth in years of therapy, much less in a few hours with a judge and a roomful of strangers.  What you need to do instead is to recognize unflinchingly that this level of bias is out there.  There are weapons against it, and many variables affect which weapons you choose.    If you deny the opponent exists, though, there's nothing you can do to fight it.

(Image of 1866 poster from the Library of Congress via PingNews at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/421405578/; license details there.)

Our Great National Jury Seminar

It's a theme of this blog that you don't have to read books or go to seminars to learn about juries.  All you have to do is look around -- except in an election year, when you don't even have to look.  It's all coming at you.  Your newspaper, television, radio, dinner parties, and office break room are all focused on one question: how people choose which of two competing candidates they will support.

The 2008 election is not only a great reality TV show on its own.  It's also a terrific voir dire workshop. Among the issues this class covers:

1.  What do race and gender really mean?  Most studies of jurors conclude that juror demographics don't directly affect verdicts -- with the important exception that jurors lean toward parties of their own ethnicity.  (That's from Devine et al, Jury Decision Making:  45 Years of Empirical Research on Deliberating Groups, 7 Psychology, Law, & Public Policy 622 (2000)).  But at the same time, we know that people of different races and genders often have shared experiences.  Since experiences in turn shape attitudes, race and gender matter in ways that go beyond loyalty, but are difficult to define.

Trial lawyers have long wanted to understand this better -- and these days, so does every news organization in America.  One fascinating piece of this is how individual one's group identity can be, as Newsweek explains in an article that's well worth reading in full:

Which candidate a voter identifies with is one of the most important gut-level heuristics, since it is tantamount to deciding that someone is enough like you to "understand the concerns of people like you," as pollsters put it. "If you feel a candidate is like you racially or by gender, you're more likely to believe that that candidate will support what you support," says [Harvard political scientist Pippa] Norris. But with a white woman and a black man vying for the Democratic nomination, where does that leave black women? Whom they most identify with depends on which aspect of their own identity dominates their self-image. For instance, in a study of whether black women believed O. J. Simpson guilty or not of the 1994 murder of his ex-wife and her friend, those whose identity as a woman trumped their sense of themselves as black were significantly more likely to believe Simpson guilty. But black women whose self-image was dominated by their race tended to believe him innocent.

2.  How much do looks matter?  We know they do, and new evidence comes in all the time.  (BPS Research Digest today reports on a study suggesting that a company's profits are related to the CEO's facial appearance.) 

Nearly every variation on this theme has come up in the election.  When Hillary Clinton is photographed looking tired and wrinkled, the world responds.  When this story came out in December, Ann Althouse said, "A picture like this of a male candidate would barely register."  That's probably true, but men's faces matter too.  CNN and others have wondered whether Mitt Romney is too good looking; but when you hear women gushing "He's perfect!" to radio reporters, you have to think his looks are a plus overall.  So is Mike Huckabee's 100-pound weight loss.  And one thing early drop-outs Bill Richardson and Fred Thompson may have had in common was that they didn't measure  up to their opponents on the look-like-a-president scale.

3.  What happens if you cry?  Scooter Libby's lawyer cried in closing argument, and it didn't seem to help.  Few lawyers would plan a teary outburst, but trials are emotional, and it can happen.  Hillary Clinton is helping us figure out exactly where the line is when it comes to tears.  By all accounts a little welling up was the most helpful thing she did in New Hampshire.   When she wiped another tear away the other day, though, she lost some people, like the vehement QuizLaw, while Nicole Black (at her great new blog Women Lawyers - Back on Track) pointed out that we probably have a double standard here too.

4.  Can you attack and still be admired?  On both sides, candidates are struggling to find the line between pointing out an opponent's weaknesses and appearing nasty and mean.  They're finding too that negative messages work better coming from some team members than from others:  Bill Clinton, for example, didn't turn out to be the right guy to go after Barack Obama.

5.  Do polling and focus groups help?  Pre-election polling was highly predictive in New Hampshire -- if you were a Republican.   The uses and limits of polling are a constant theme now, as campaigns and news organizations gear up for each new contest and then find out where and how they were wrong.

6.  How can I improve my presentation style?  It will be four years before you have another chance to see two or three major speeches, given by talented presenters and written by the best speechwriters in the country, every single day.  Watch Barack Obama speak.  Then watch him again.  Watch Hillary Clinton in small groups, where she excels.  If you agree with me that Mike Huckabee is able to strike a more personal note from the podium than either John McCain or Mitt Romney can, see if you can identify what he's doing to accomplish that.

(Photo by Joe Crimmings at http://www.flickr.com/photos/joecrimmings/2096982084/; license details there.)

I Wish I'd Thought Of That

Are you reading Mark Herrmann and Jim Beck's Drug and Device Law Blog?  If not, you need to start, even if you plan to retire without ever touching a case about pharmaceuticals and medical devices.  This week, for example, you missed two good posts about jury questionnaires. 

The first post, by Herrmann's Jones Day partner Richard Stuhan, explains why you want a jury questionnaire.  The reasons are clear and copious, enough to convince not only you but also your client and maybe your judge that questionnaires are a good idea.  (Stuhan knows this stuff; he was behind the survey last year suggesting that prior inconsistent statements aren't nearly the devastating cross-examination we think they are.)

"A single sheet of paper"

The next day, Herrmann and Beck followed up with a post modestly titled "A Thought On Jury Questionnaires."  What a thought:

Aim for a questionnaire that consists of just a single sheet of paper, printed on two sides.

A single sheet of paper?  Are they kidding?  Here at Deliberations we collect jury questionnaires.  Some are very helpful and some are less helpful, some are creative and some are rote, some are insightful and some are kind of dumb -- but none of them are short.  A single sheet?

I'll let Beck and Herrmann explain how to do it, but it sounds like it would work.  They explain why they think it's a good idea -- easier for jurors and thus easier for the judge to approve -- but I'll try it next time for a different reason.  Even when a long questionnaire is approved by the judge and carefully completed by the jurors, you still have to manage all the information the questionnaires contain.  Standing in front of a bunch of people waiting for your next question, you can't be thumbing through a 30-page questionnaire with lots of blanks for long answers.  You need summaries of the questionnaires, and a chart summarizing the summaries.  With each summarizing step, you get farther away from the juror's handwriting and actual words.

If the whole questionnaire were on one sheet, you'd work with it differently, more closely, more easily.  This is a good idea.

(Photo by Joe Loong at http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelogon/1497350439/; license details there.)