Caroline B. Crocker

The Effects of Rehabilitative Voir Dire on Juror Bias and Decision Making

During voir dire, judges frequently attempt to “rehabilitate” venirepersons who express an inability to be impartial. Venirepersons who agree to ignore their biases and base their verdict on the evidence and the law are eligible for jury service. In Experiment 1, biased and unbiased mock jurors participated in either a standard or rehabilitative voir dire conducted by a judge and watched a trial video. Rehabilitation influenced insanity defense attitudes and perceptions of the defendant’s mental state, and decreased scaled guilt judgments compared to standard questioning. Although rehabilitation is intended to correct for partiality among biased jurors, rehabilitation similarly influenced biased and unbiased jurors. Experiment 2 found that watching rehabilitation did not influence jurors’ perceptions of the judge’s personal beliefs about the case.

Systematic Jury Selection

Jury selection takes place during voir dire, the pretrial proceeding during which the judge and attorneys question potential jurors with the aim of identifying venire members who are unfit for jury service. Jury “selection” is a bit of a misnomer as attorneys do not choose individuals to serve on the jury; instead jurors who are unable to remain impartial are deselected from jury service. Voir dire proceedings may take different forms depending on the jurisdiction. Many states have adopted very limited voir dire in which the judge poses questions to venire members. In extended voir dire, questioning is conducted by the judge and both attorneys (Jones, 1987). The judge holds discretion over the content and length of questioning. The manner of questioning during voir dire can also vary; although questioning is frequently conducted in open court, in some circumstances the judge may choose to question venirepersons individually (for a discussion of limited vs. extended voir dire, see Johnson & Haney, 1994).