Word: voir
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Even jury duty in Los Angeles is glamorous. During jury selection at the shoplifting trial of actress Winona Ryder, at least half a dozen people connected to the film industry went through voir dire. At the end of the process, Peter Guber, former chairman of Sony Pictures, ended up being impaneled. Guber revealed that while he was head of the studio, his company made a film with Ryder, but after promising he could be objective, he was selected to serve. Guber, who heads Mandalay Entertainment, will have to lay off Daily Variety for a while. The judge has forbidden jurors...
...Finally, toward dinnertime, the Republicans called Richard Grossman, a rubber and plastics "expert" whose status as such was immediately challenged by perhaps over-combative Democratic lawyer Stephen Zack, who insisted on conducting a voir dire (to test a witness's expertise). Zack was unceremoniously cut short by a red-faced Judge Sauls, who furiously pointed out the attorney was not asking relevant questions and told him to sit down in no uncertain terms...
Henry Hyde opened by reading the resumes of the other 12 managers. This reverse voir dire yielded one illuminating fact: they're not just lawyers; four of them served in the JAG corps, which punishes adultery with imprisonment. (Is it just a coincidence that JAG is majority leader Trent Lott's favorite TV program?) They heaped both flattery ("We want you to know how much we respect you") and abuse (each speech duplicated others, with lectures on the law to lawyers, who had to sit there and take it). The House managers are such unknowns that photos were circulated...
Also seriously threatened: VOIR (for Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar), a scheme to place a radar-equipped robot in orbit around Venus and map its cloud-covered surface. NASA officials are even talking about mothballing the Deep Space Network, a globe-girdling array of antennas that acts as a vital communications "downlink" with all U.S. unmanned planetary spacecraft. One effect of such a move would be to silence the transmissions of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is scheduled to pass by Uranus...
Sometimes, as you know, one is "bumped" on voir dire because he is a reader of TIME...