Word: voir
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...July. Not one of the prospective jurors could claim that he had never heard of the case; each had to be examined closely by prosecution and defense to discover whether he had formed an opinion and how it might affect him in reaching a verdict. The selection process, called voir dire, ran through 27 days and 610 prospective jurors before the jury was finally picked last week. It served to dramatize the legal truism that in U.S. criminal practice the voir dire is often more crucial than the actual trial...
...Real Start. Voir dire is an art practiced largely in U.S. state courts. British judges simply call twelve veniremen at random without even asking their occupations. American federal judges usually do the questioning themselves. But in most state courts, lawyers are freely permitted to use voir dire not only to select jurors but to "condition" them. "Voir dire is really the start of a criminal trial," says F. Lee Bailey. "If you do it carelessly, you can lose a case by the time you get a jury together...
Reasonable Doubt. Rejection is only part of the process. Lawyers exploit voir dire as their only chance to make friends with individual jurors. They joke, flatter, hatch homilies and seek what Manhattan's Stanley Reiben calls "transference of identity." All the while, the defense attorney struggles to get across the law's presumption that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. As Houston's Walter F. Walsh points out: "Many jurors will not and cannot, within the confines of conscience, find a defendant not guilty just because there...
...attorney may accept them: some people yearn to prove themselves unprejudiced. Moreover, lawyers commonly ask jurors in advance to guarantee disregard for this or that messy fact ("Will you disregard the defendant's adultery?"). Not for nothing does Percy Foreman devote as much as ten days to voir dire. "Once we chose the jury in the Candy Mossier case (see following story)," he says, "I knew we were in. They had promised to consider only murder as the crime on trial...
Death Verdict? To greater or lesser extent, all of these factors weighed in the Speck voir dire. For his part, State's Attorney William Martin, 30, took a cool approach. "Where the crime speaks for itself," he said, "it is not for us to seek the sympathy of the jurors." Though he was searching for the relatives of policemen, nurses and young girls, Martin mainly focused on reactions to the most important question: "Do you have any conscientious or religious objections to the death penalty...