Deck 6: Section 1: Child Sexual Abuse: Interviewing Children and the Recovered Memories of Adults

Question 1

How effective is scientific jury selection?

Answer 1

Main points:
• The idea behind scientific jury selection is to figure out which demographic and personality characteristics of potential jurors are correlated with their verdict decisions.
• Even though studies show that in the vast majority of cases, jury selection does not affect the outcome, there are certainly a few cases when it actually does make a difference.
• Two most famous examples of this kind are the "Harrisburg Seven" and OJ Simpson's trial.

Question 2

Explain how the role of money in trial consulting may affect trial outcomes. Are there any possible solutions to the problems you have identified?

Answer 2

Main points:
• Trial consultants are hired to fine-tune decisions made before and during the trial to make it more likely that the trial is decided one specific way.
• Trial consultants are expensive so only the wealthy people and corporations are able to afford them (even though there a pro bono exception, it represents a small percentage of cases).
• Besides trial consultants, the wealthy can also hire better, more experienced lawyers.
• One possible solution is to match the side that hires a trial consultant or expert by providing money for the other side to do the same. It would be an expensive solution though since the taxpayers would have to foot the bill.

Question 3

Explain the voir dire process.

Answer 3

Main points:
• Voir dire is the final stage of the process of selecting a jury.
• It consists of questioning of potential jurors by the attorneys and the judge to see who is most likely to be an unbiased juror.
• Voir dire is like a pretrial interview with potential jurors where questions about life experiences and attitudes are asked.
• If attorneys feel that a particular person is unlikely to be impartial, they ask the judge to remove that person from the jury pool--this is called a challenge.
• There are two types of challenges: challenges for cause and peremptory challenges. For the former, a reason needs to be given by the attorney. For the latter, no reason is given. Attorneys have a limited number of peremptory challenges; most of them are given to the defense attorneys since their clients have more to lose.
• At the end of the process of elimination through voir dire, the jury is formed from the people who remained.