Word: juror
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Despite the tedium, the atmosphere was tense from the beginning. After Mrs. Huggins' attorney, Catherine Roraback, noticed a prospective juror trembling on the stand, she asked, "Are you afraid of my client?" The reply was a shaky "yes." Scores of veniremen, faced with the prospect of months away from their jobs and families, were swiftly excused simply because they stated that they had an opinion of the defendants' guilt. "These people aren't dumbbells," Mulvey commented. "They don't want to sit on this case...
Charles Garry said last week, "You know right away whom you don't want." Thus often the defense questioning is geared towards "trapping" the juror into admitting to the court some prejudice or experience which is predictable to the sympathetic observer...
Last week when I visited the trial, the defense was left with only one precious peremptory challenge, and the pressure was immense to "trap" the hostile juror into making a statement which would give the court cause to excuse him. The very last member of one panel of 50 jurors was a college-educated supervisor at Schick-Eversharp Razor, a company which is currently engaged in making a film about the Panthers. This man, a member of the National Rifle Association, had talked to colleagues who had been excused for cause, for being, among other things, too involved with...
Obviously a poor risk for Seale and Huggins.... A true undercover agent.... Yet although Garry and Roraback questioned him for almost an hour, this juror refused to admit that he had been exposed to any publicity, that he had any opinions whatsoever, that his various connections would prejudice him in any way. At last Garry was forced to use his last challenge to get rid of him. As he left the courtroom, the juror smirked at Seale as if to say, "You may have kept me off your jury but I sure did some damage in the process...
That day in court one juror was selected, however. The policewoman who searched my body and my belongings for unidentified dangerous objects as I entered the courtroom commented later that I must have brought everyone luck. The tenth juror was a true case of American Blind Justice-a black woman who had a problem with her eyes which prevented her from reading the newspaper and thus insulated her from pre-trial publicity...