Word: juror
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...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...
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...