Word: juror
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hanley and his trial partner, Chester Kamin, attached such importance to the kind of juror they would get that they hired a political polling firm to survey the attitudes of potential jurors toward each side's arguments. This technique, like those pioneered by liberal lawyers during the political trials of the 1970s, provided a demographic profile of the kind of jurors MCI should seek: self-made and competitive people, intelligent, first-and second-generation Americans, susceptible to arguments that mighty AT&T had been unfair...
...strongest and most quirky elements in a jury's thinking is often racial antagonism. In Washington, D.C., where 80% of the jurors are black, one white juror recalls a trial in which a white policeman was accused of hitting a black. Says she: "When we went into the jury room, the seven blacks sat on one side of the table, and the five whites sat on the other. The blacks just smoked cigarettes and glared at us until we voted against the policeman...
...Miami, it took three weeks to impanel jurors in the trial of four blacks accused of beating three whites to death during last year's rioting, and the pressure was so great that one prospective juror suffered a respiratory seizure. The chosen jury was sequestered in a motel, forbidden to have television or telephones, constantly watched by three police officers. "We walked around like little soldiers," recalls Foreman Dale Dollar, 25, a black who works for Florida Power & Light Co. "It felt like the jury was on trial...
After seven days of testimony, the nine white and three black jurors received 30 pages of instructions, which Dollar calls "intimidating," and then the real struggle began. Says Dollar of the four days that finally led to guilty verdicts for three of the defendants: "It was so tense in there it was mind-boggling. One juror, Barbara Freeman, was pounding on the table, calling those guys animals. She was hollering, 'Murder one! Murder one!' " Says Freeman, an advertising production manager: "It's a real skin stripper. You find out a lot about yourself. I came...
Reasonable enough treatment of prisoners. But these were not the defendants; they were the jurors. The trial was the prosecution of the so-called Pontiac Ten, which dragged on for nearly eight months until last May, making it one of the longest criminal trials in U.S. history. More than 1,000 potential jurors were questioned by batteries of lawyers, and each side had 120 peremptory challenges. Jury selection alone took five months, and the jurors were sequestered during the whole trial. "How would I describe the experience?" asks Juror Harry Chartrand, 64, a retired electrical worker. "In two words: Lousy...