How Well Do You Know Your Jurors?
Jack Zemlicka’s recent article on internet research of potential or actual jurors raises some good issues. The article primarily discusses investigating potential jurors in the days leading up to jury selection (kinda like Gene Hackman in the Runaway Jury). As the article points out, however, there are many courts (Milwaukee County, for one) where the juror list is not available until a few minutes before the jurors walk into the court room. Unless a client is willing to pay for a LOT of support, the time frames make it impossible to glean useful information in such short order. As a result, most Milwaukee County juries are picked the old-fashioned way — intuition, experience, and let’s face it, some luck.
However, that doesn’t mean that no research can or should be done once the jury has been selected. In the last trial I had in Milwaukee, we learned a great deal about our jury after the close of business on the first day. I believe that it helped to better craft our case, which eventually prevailed. It’s easy to get caught up in the science of lawyering — the details of preparing for the next witness, the arguments over evidence, preserving objections and the record for appeal, or preparation of exhibits and demonstrative evidence. We can sometimes overlook that a trial is mostly about persuading the people who sit in the jury box that we are fair, trustworthy, and reasonable. The more we know about them, the more chance we have to succeed.
Jury dootie begins photo courtesy kelly cree under this creative commons license.
