After a few more blanket queries, the judge smiles at the group. “All right, folks. I’m going to excuse you, and the bailiff will take you to the jury lounge. We’ll be calling you in one at a time so that the counselors can ask some individual follow-ups. Please don’t talk about your experiences with your fellow jurors. As I told you, the State has the burden of proof. We haven’t started to take evidence yet, so I urge you to keep an open mind and to be honest with your answers in front of the court. We want to make sure you are comfortable sitting as a juror in this case, just as the parties involved have the right to feel that their process can be judged by someone fair and impartial.”
If only the judge were the same,I think.
Voir dire is a cocktail party without any booze. You want to schmooze your jurors, you want them to like you. You want to act interested in their careers, even if that career is quality control at a Vaseline plant. As each individual juror is paraded before you, you rate him or her. A perfect juror is a 5. A bad juror is a 1.
Howard will list the reasons that a juror isn’t acceptable, so we can keep them straight. Ultimately we’ll wind up taking 3s and 4s and 5s, because we have only seven peremptory strikes we can use to kick a juror out of the pool without having to give a reason. And we don’t want to use those all up at once, because what if there’s abiggerproblem juror yet to come?
The first man to take the stand is Derrick Welsh. He’s fifty-eight and has bad teeth and is wearing an untucked plaid shirt. Odette greets him with a smile. “Mr. Welsh, how are you doing today?”
“All right I guess. A little hungry.”
She smiles. “Me too. Tell me, have we ever worked on any cases together?”
“No,” he says.
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Welsh?”
“I run a hardware store.”
She asks him about his children and their ages. Howard taps me on the shoulder. He’s been frantically sifting through the surveys. “This is the one whose brother is a cop,” he whispers.
“I readThe Wall Street Journal,” Welsh is saying, when I turn back. “And Harlan Coben.”
“Have you heard about this case?”
“A little bit. On the news,” he admits. “I know the nurse was accused of killing a baby.”
Beside me, Ruth flinches.
“Do you have any opinion about whether the defendant is guilty of that offense?” Odette asks.
“As far as I know, in our country everyone’s innocent till they’re proven guilty.”
“How do you see your role as a juror?”
He shrugs. “I guess listen to evidence…and do what the judge says.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Odette says, and she sits down.
I rise from my seat. “Hi there, Mr. Welsh,” I say. “You have a relative in law enforcement, don’t you?”
“My brother is a police officer.”
“Does he work in this community?”
“For fifteen years,” the juror replies.
“Does he ever tell you about his job? What kinds of people he deals with?”
“Sometimes…”
“Has your store ever been vandalized?”
“We were robbed once.”
“Do you think the increase in crime is due to an influx of minorities in the community?
He considers this. “I think it has more to do with the economy. People lose jobs, they get desperate.”
