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Deliberations collects juror art, as you may know — drawings and photographs made by real people on jury duty, gathered in what we cheerfully call the "American Gallery of Juror Art." The collection is meant to show both the light side of jury duty and also the often-missed depth and talent of many jurors. Much of the work is extraordinary. ...

A recent study highlights what might be the most important thing lawyers and clients miss about how juries will react to their cases. The same evidence that makes you angry at the other side might make jurors angry at you. I'll show you how it works. Here's a fact about health care. Ready? Many people get diabetes because of social ...

The Jury Expert doesn't need me anymore, but I'll keep posting about new issues anyway. Back in May 2008 when the first on-line issue of the American Society of Trial Consultants' bimonthly journal came out, it got 500 hits, and if Deliberations wasn't the only blog to write about it, it was one of a very few. A year and ...

What does it take to get a jury in a traditionally conservative area to award $49 million in a personal injury case? San Francisco lawyer Randall Scarlett just did it, for a 21-year-old client who suffered traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Big plaintiffs' verdicts are often criticized as the product of runaway emotion, but Mr. Scarlett's explanation of ...

We love simple rules here at Deliberations, and so I'm only a little embarrassed that I'm not the blogger who came up with a set of simple rules for better jury selection. Mark Bennett is, and he's building it as we speak. Here's Mark's "Simple Rules" post; he updates the links as he posts detail explaining each rule. By the ...

Does a civil trial lawyer need a book about restitution? “Federal Criminal Restitution,” a new handbook by Catherine M. Goodwin, Jay E. Grenig, and Nathan A. Fishbach, turned out to be the most useful book to hit our office in a long time. “Federal restitution has become an increasingly important issue at sentencing for most federal crimes,” say the authors. ...

The New York Times had a nice article yesterday on conspiracy theorists, especially those who believe the Apollo moon landings were a government hoax. It's a good reminder that — unlike all the things they believe are out there — conspiracy theorists really are out there, and on juries. You know about the most widely held conspiracy theories: moon landings ...

The better the trial lawyer, the better her sense of what experiences have been important to other people — that is, to jurors. But we all have blind spots. One of mine, it turns out, was Michael Jackson. I know I risk losing subscribers when I say this, but I missed him entirely, or more accurately missed his music and ...

The news is full of “bad juror” stories. It’s not that there are so many of them; but when they do come up, they bounce all over the media. The bored juror who went AWOL in Oregon last month hit the ABA Journal on May 20, and was still making headlines in England on Friday. Just in the last few ...

The most interesting thing about the New York Times article on female bullies in the workplace . . . is how interesting it apparently is. Four days after it appeared on line and three days after the print edition, it's still among the ten most E-mailed articles on the entire Times site. Every other article in the top ten (as ...

About a year ago I wrote a post about a Wisconsin court of appeals opinion affirming a small-town trial judge who refused to strike his own mother from the jury for cause. The post was fun to write, and I remember it fondly because other than my Blawg Review post, it's the only post here that Above The Law ever ...

Two jurors who fell asleep have been replaced at an Ohio financial fraud trial heavy in testimony about bookkeeping and check-writing. That's the opening line from an Associated Press story out of Akron yesterday, but unless you're following that particular trial (of former executives of Evergreen Homes), the main thing that's newsworthy is that these sleeping jurors made the paper ...

Last year I was a little flippant when I wrote about Robert Martin, the New Jersey lawyer, law professor, and state legislator who made the mistake of admitting, in an article about his jury service, that his opinions “swayed other jurors and were extremely influential in the final outcome.” “Well of course they did,” I said, and tried to explain ...

The juror on Twitter this weekend in Philadelphia’s high-profile Fumo trial must have been the tipping point. Suddenly everyone is talking about jurors on the Internet. The New York Times has a front-page article today that has gotten a lot of attention, in part for the wise comments of Douglas Keene, president of the American Society of Trial Consultants. Meanwhile ...

Just my luck. I leave town for two days, away from the Internet for once in my life, and the blogosphere decides to spend the whole time talking about peremptory challenges to potential jurors. Peremptory strikes, the cons and pros (and pros and pros) It started with an article by Nathan Koppel in the Wall Street Journal, discussing proposed reforms ...

It may be the single most frustrating piece of jury advice for young lawyers: “Watch the jury.” Watch them what?, I used to think. They’re just sitting there! I felt like I could watch the jury for hours and never see a facial expression. There are many exceptions, but often, jurors keep very straight faces through even the most disturbing ...

It happened again. A juror accessed Twitter from court, and everybody's twitting out about it. In a financial fraud case in Arkansas, a juror named Johnathan tweeted a little before and after — but not during — the trial. In between, his jury awarded $12.6 million to the plaintiffs. Now the corporate defendant's lawyer claims Johnathan's tweets as grounds for ...

Every facet of life makes its way into the courtroom eventually. So it shouldn’t be surprising that jurors fall in love: Sometimes they fall for each other. It happened last week in Denver, when two jurors were sent home from Alex Midyette’s child abuse trial after they were reported “walking arm-in-arm together and giggling.” In St. Louis in December, Roberto ...

Jury consultants don’t get many questions that have easy answers, but here’s one, and lawyers ask it all the time. How do you handle difficult vocabulary – industry, technical, or legal jargon – with the jury? Remarkably often, the lawyer phrases the question as though there were only two possible answers, something like this: “Should I bore them by explaining ...

Sometimes it's the most basic things that matter. In college I was a lifeguard at a Girl Scout camp, and it turned out the most important skill wasn't saving swimmers; it was counting them. If you started with eleven red caps, you needed eleven red caps at all points during the swimming period, and most importantly, eleven red caps when ...

Robert Gibbons was tried in what apparently was a very small courtroom in Goshen, New York, for the rape of his 15-year-old daughter. He had told the police, “it was mutual, I didn’t rape her.” That’s a conviction that many people – including, it seems, a series of appellate and postconviction judges — would naturally want very much to stand. ...

The ASTC’s Jury Expert on-line magazine has been so well received that announcing a new issue is now the easiest post I ever have to write. This is all straight from the table of contents, and I don’t need to add anything to make it clear how relevant each article is: On the Obstacles to Jury Diversity, by Samuel R. ...

I just found a jury blog I didn’t know about. It’s called Things That Make You Go Hmmm . . . , from the jury consulting firm Jury Impact. They’ve been up for just under a year, with 36 anonymous posts in that time. Like most blogs, it’s mostly links to and comments on news stories (Dennis Quaid and the ...

Deliberations’ American Gallery of Juror Art went a little viral last week, after it turned up in Boing Boing (“a directory of wonderful things”). Several bloggers picked it up from there, including Robert Ambrogi in Legal Blog Watch, and it popped up periodically on Twitter all week. Deliberations is pleased to bring a small bit of attention to these varied ...

How’s this for a race-neutral reason to strike a black juror? I do not select overweight people on the jury panel for reasons that, based on my reading and past experience, that heavy-set people tend to be very sympathetic toward any defendant. So said the prosecutor in Seth Dolphy’s 1997 New York trial on drug, weapon, and assault charges, and ...

Are you picking a jury on January 5? Be glad you won't have me on the panel. If you're still picking jurors by demographic profile alone, you might think you want someone like me. I'm fairly educated, a lawyer, a parent, a blogger, pretty senior at my office and thus used to leading project groups — that's not the right ...

I swear they keep this blog in business, those social networking jurors. I didn't set out to cover that particular jury issue so heavily, but from the first week, when I set up searches to find topics to cover here, the juror blogs started showing up in my news feeds, so I wrote about them. Today, although (really) I write ...

What do judges talk about when they talk about voir dire? Judge Gregory Mize is gently challenging his colleagues to make voir dire better, by comparing a new set of inspiring goals to new data documenting a less inspiring reality. If there were a blog devoted entirely to Judge Mize's work to improve the jury system, that blog would have ...

On Tuesday, I reviewed "Building A Better Voir Dire," the article by Judge Gregory Mize and Paula Hannaford-Agor of the National Center for State Courts. The article challenged judges to work creatively to help the actual practice of jury selection live up to the ideals most of us share. Now it's your turn. What do you think judges should do ...

It finally happened. After all these months, this blog got its first comment from the Fully Informed Jury Association, or someone claiming to represent that group. You’ll miss it if I just publish it as a comment to another post, so here it is on its own: Voir dire is unconstitutional jury tampering. Jury questioning arose as a result of ...