I’m on a jury panel this week and I particularly want to point out that there is an alternative to voire dire that is superior to the current system.
Here in San Francisco, a good representative group of people has been randomly selected from a combination of the county voting lists and the drivers license list. A visual glance at the more than two hundred people in the jury pool room is confirmation of the deep validity of random sampling. It looks like the diverse San Francisco that I love; age, ethnicity, sociology and individuality.
The random jury pool promptly gets cut in half because of all the people who want to be excused.
From than point on, voire dire proceeds on 120 remaining people. Each side in the trial tries to pick jurors who will favor their position. The jury at this point represent nothing except the least offensive group that each lawyer can live with.
A jury of your peers is only possible with a random sample. That is all that is guaranteed in our Bill of Rights. We should get 12 jurors and 4 alternates from the original random list. The only voire dire that should be tolerated is to screen out people who can’t understand the proceedings, who aren’t citizens and who are clearly nuts. The remaining people are truly our peers. A real random sample represents a cross section of all the people in our county.
Of course jurors have to be paid a reasonable fee, like the average daily wage in this county, lest we lose people from the representative population for a whole range of bias problems.
I’m not proposing anything unique. I’ve been a champion of randomly selected legislative bodies for twenty-five years and wrote a book on the subject, Citizen Legislature.