Richard Krooth

Jury Selection Procedures

The starting point in jury selection is sending a jury summons, which calls prospective jurors to the courthouse. Yet relatively few eligible citizens are successful in finally entering the jury box. Before they reach the courthouse, most prospective jurors are screened out by a variety of legal and extralegal factors.

Sociologists in Action: The McMartin Sexual Abuse Case, Litigation, Justice, and Mass Hysteria

This paper describes our involvement as jury consultants in one of the most notorious criminal trials in history—the McMartin child-molestation trial in Los Angeles. The McMartin trial was the longest and costliest criminal trial in American history. The prosecution spent

The U.S. Supreme Court, the Constitutional Background of Jury Selection, and Racial Representation

15 million and took nearly six years in making a criminal case against day-care workers, only to have the jurors declare them not guilty. The defendants in the McMartin trial were charged with molesting young children at a preschool in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles County, California. In 1987, we had performed scientific defense voir dire jury selection to choose the most impartial jurors to try the two defendants, Raymond Buckey and Peggy Buckey McMartin. In performing scientific jury selection, both a community survey and pre-voir dire questionnaires served as an important empirical foundation to assess jurors’ attitudinal, demographic, and socioeconomic characteristics to develop the effective juror profiles for the trial.

Scientific Jury Selection in Voir Dire

The “liberation” of slaves by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the course of the Civil War laid a new foundation for the legal rights of blacks that then had to be vindicated by political, military, and legal steps. As Union troops advanced into the South, the Proclamation brought freedom to slaves in all conquered regions not specifically exempted from it (Trefousse, 1987). When the dust of war settled and southern blacks were once more being controlled by reestablished, majority-dominant legislatures and the narrow economic structures of share-cropping and company towns, the courts became the only avenue for securing the most nominal human or civil rights case-by-case.

The Structural Approach to Racial Inequality in the Jury System and Jury Selection

The purpose of voir dire is to find a fair and impartial jury. In reality, however, jury selection often becomes a battleground on which both prosecution and defense search out jurors who are likely to favor their side. With experience, counsel can develop a “critical eye,” using insightful observation to identify favorably inclined jurors. Both the defense and the prosecution can dismiss, without cause, a limited number of potential jurors based on their subjective judgments alone. Such factors as race, physical stature, gender, age, religion, general appearance, presentation, and expressed beliefs may be seen as indicators that a potential juror will favor one side or the other. More recently, this intuitive approach has been expanded by the use of computers and sophisticated statistical techniques. Technology has elevated human judgments to a new and higher state in the systematic selection of prospective jurors during voir dire.

Anatomy of Economic Excuses

The primary influence on the contemporary jury system in the United States is derived from early English colonists who brought their legal institutions to North America. Subsequently, the jury system evolved as an essential ingredient of America’s judicial framework.

The Optimal Design to Obtain a Racially Representative Jury

The jury, speaking for the community, is viewed as an essential element of a democratic government that derives its power from the people. Further, the democratic principle of fair and equal participation in the judicial decision-making process underlies the assumption of a trial by one’s peers. Although jury service is supposed to be a right and privilege of citizenship, it is often considered a nuisance, and many people do not believe in the necessity of democratic participation in jury service.

The McMartin Trial

The Federal Jury Selection and Service Act was passed in 1968 guaranteeing that “all litigants in Federal courts entitled to trial by jury shall have the right to grand and petit juries selected at random from a fair cross-section of the community” (U.S., 1968, Section 1861).2 Current federal law attempts to insure this goal by specifying two key concepts in forming the jury venire. During panel selection procedures, there must be (1) “a random” selection of jurors and (2) selection from an area that includes special geographic districts in which a particular court convenes (U.S., 1968, Section 1861).3 At the state level, a similar standard applies.4

Race and the jury : racial disenfranchisement and the search for justice

Sexual abuse of children became a national preoccupation in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1985, the Meese Commission claimed that the child-pornography industry grossed

Race and the jury

675 million per annum. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) estimated the figure at