In voir dire you need to be ready for anything, and anybody.
I botched this in my first voir dire, a practice one in law school. "What do you do?" I cheerily asked a mock juror. "I'm a garbage collector," he cheerily replied.
The great Irving Younger was our trial advocacy teacher at Cornell, and he'd told us to ask open-ended questions to get jurors talking. I froze. What could I ask a garbage collector? Would he think I was mocking his job? Would I embarrass him? Or worse, would he be laughing at me? Hopelessly entangled in overthinking this moment, I moved on to the next person, and learned nothing at all about my garbage collector.
"Summoned for jury duty in my old male name"
I thought of that guy when my "jury duty" search picked up this inquiry at one of the forums at Susan's Place Transgender Resources, "a support resource for the transgender community":
I have been summoned for jury duty in my old male name. The last two times I was not required to go. I am to check the county web site on the Friday before to see if I am still required to go. It is ironic as I have to report to the courthouse where I plan to file for my name change as soon as I can put together enough cash for the filing fee. Another irony is that my Driver's license and other photo ID is now in my new name. The only way I have to prove that I am the person in the summons is a letter from my therapist stating my transgender status. I hope that should I have to go to jury duty that they will be discreet about it. I plan to go up to the official and immediately explain my situation. I will go in female mode as I have no male ID now. I did not see this coming!!!!
It's a pretty good guess that the lawyers who'll be doing that voir dire didn't see it coming either. They're at their desks right now, going over the list of potential jurors, trying to figure out what they can from names, ages, neighborhoods, and occupations. (Every Sunday night I get a surge in searches for sample voir dire questions.) They think they're ready for Daniel or Thomas or whatever their list says that juror's name is. But they're not.
You need to be ready for what you're not ready for. The juror who tells you she has seventeen cats, the juror who tells you his child was killed, the juror who isn't a man after all -- you can't botch these moments. Your compassion, your awareness, your intelligence, and your character will be judged on how you handle the next thirty seconds. You need to be at the very least, as the transgender juror hopes, discreet. Warm, engaged, and unfazed would be better.
Not about you
The more you've done in life, the easier this is. The lawyers who are most adept at voir dire are the ones who excel at conversation with strangers generally, and those are so often the ones who had a lot of different jobs before they became lawyers. But it's learnable -- take it from someone who's spent 27 years in the same job, longer in the same marriage, and almost as long in the same house. You just need to forget about yourself for a second and think about the person you're talking to. "We all thank you for the work you do," is what I should have said to the garbage man. "You've been through challenges that few of us can imagine," you might say to the transgender juror. "Tell me about your life now."
(Photo by Liz Henry at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhenry/204197241/; license details there.)
