Jury Selection

Jury selection ("voir dire" in legalese) involves getting potential jurors talking about things that might affect how they will decide a case. If you sit in the criminal courthouse listening to a lawyer conducting jury selection, it's easy to tell whether it's being done properly: in a proper jury selection, the lawyer will be talking 10% of the time and the prospective jurors will be talking 90% of the time; in a badly-conducted jury selection, the percentages will be reversed.

One important object of voir dire is to build rapport with the people who will wind up being on the jury. We don't build rapport with people by lecturing them or talking down to them. To the contrary, we build rapport with people by listening to them, understanding their stories, and acknowledging their feelings even if we don't agree with them.

Another object of voir dire is to find the people whose life experiences will make them unfavorable jurors to our client's case. Again, we don't get people talking about the things that might affect how they see our clients by lecturing them; we do it by listening to them and acknowledging their feelings even if we don't agree. If a potential juror says something that seems bad for our client (for example, "I think a person charged with a crime is probably guilty.") we thank them, and our gratitude is sincere because we would rather find out about such attitudes early, when we can do something about them (by keeping the person off our jury) than either late or not at all.