Word: juror
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Supreme Court. At issue: a small drug sale. "Are you living with anybody?" the defense lawyer asks a middle-aged widow. The woman looks uncomfortable. "We're not gossip columnists," the judge intervenes. "We only want to ask questions that determine if you are a fair and impartial juror. Many people nowadays live together." The woman says she lives alone. The questioning continues...
...worst thing is not the irrelevant questions," says one survivor of voir dire, "but the fact that you're locked into a dingy room with 30 other would-be jurors and two or more lawyers, who then proceed to pound each of you with the same questions. This can take a half-hour or more for each juror, and then you have to hear it all over and over again. After a day or so, you'll grab at anything...
...questioning fails to produce any sign of prejudice or other unfitness, finally, an attorney can still ban a juror by exercising one of his peremptory challenges (the number for each side generally ranges from four to ten, though the total for the defense goes higher in criminal cases in some states). The lawyer need not give any reason, or even have any. "It's very upsetting to get bounced," says John Shore, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. "To be denied because you're too smart, or because you're the wrong race...
...reason." New York Legal Aid Society Attorney Dan Nobel is philosophical: "I look for someone who's basically not bitter about life, someone who knows that this is not the best of all worlds." Courtroom Star Louis Nizer suggests subtler methods. Says he: "If I see a juror who draws his mouth together very tightly, I'm inclined to think he's a severe fellow, too severe...
...system's defenders, the average juror's lack of expertise is not a handicap but a positive value, for the jurors are supposed to represent the community's sense of right and wrong. "Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men . . . G.K." Chesterton wrote. "It asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury...