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Federal judge Amy St. Eve of the Northern District of Illinois may be setting a record for total pages of jury questionnaires used by a single judge. She presided over Conrad Black's trial that began a year ago this week, and approved the 45-page questionnaire used there. Now she is hearing the trial of Tony Rezko, best known as a ...

Back when Snyder v. Lousiana was argued, I wondered whether the opinion might be Justice Breyer's chance "to reconsider Batson's test and the peremptory challenge system as a whole," as he has put it. The Court decided Snyder today (the opinion is here, thanks to ScotusBlog), and far from reconsidering tests and systems, Snyder is one of the most conscientiously ...

Things have been quiet here lately, but my excuse is good. I've been in Japan, talking about juries. As I wrote in September, Japan is in the middle of a historic transition. For the first time in living memory, serious criminal trials in Japan will be decided not by three-judge panels as they are now, but by a group of ...

I learned a lot about Japan on my trip there — the legal system, the Tokyo subway, the easiest way to apologize. But as I gather my thoughts about it, the first things I want to say are what I learned about my own country — and more specifically, about American jurors — by traveling to another place. Three things ...

Today is St. Patrick's Day, so I thought I'd write about the jury system in Ireland. It turns out to be a complex and poignant topic. A thoughtful 1999 paper traces the struggles of Ireland's jury system up to that time. It's called "The Jury System in Contemporary Ireland: In the Shadow of a Troubled Past," by Irish law scholars ...

Sure, it’s a fundamental bulwark of liberty, the only place in our system where a few ordinary citizens can deny the power of prosecutors, judges, presidents, and legislators. Big deal, compared to this, from South Dakota’s Rapid City Journal: A juror in a federal rape trial may have saved the life of a fellow juror who was choking by performing ...

The trial judge thought it was merely glossophobia. Eric Turkewitz passed on this story from Thomas Swartz's New York Legal Update, on a February 21 New York appellate opinion, People v. Figueroa. The trial itself in Figueroa's robbery case apparently went smoothly — but after the jury sent word that it had reached a verdict, something unusual happened. "The foreperson ...

Here's a new proposed jury questionnaire for Deliberations's collection, from the upcoming federal corruption trial of former Orange County, California sheriff Mike Corona, his mistress, and his wife. The questions You'd think that a case with that cast of characters might have few stipulations, but it looks like the defense is submitting questions jointly, and even the government agrees to ...

There's a new jury blog, a good one. Since January 2, University of Dayton law professor Thaddeus Hoffmeister has been writing about juries at a blog called, yes, Juries. Recent topics include: • The Florida Supreme Court's better-than-Batson system for questioning peremptory challenges; • What happens when a famous NASCAR driver shows up for jury duty; • The arrival of ...

Are you reading Mark Herrmann and Jim Beck's Drug and Device Law Blog? If not, you need to start, even if you plan to retire without ever touching a case about pharmaceuticals and medical devices. This week, for example, you missed two good posts about jury questionnaires. The first post, by Herrmann's Jones Day partner Richard Stuhan, explains why you ...

I've been deep in trial preparation, and thus off line, for the last week or so, and I've missed a lot. There are over a thousand stories piled up in my feed reader. Here are some worth stopping over: They're frugal in Nashua. Jim Burke and Dave Eisner of New Hampshire Law Blog point to research done by the Nashua ...

You're a federal prosecutor in Chicago, starting a trial against a Yale-educated, African-American consulting firm executive who used his firm's payroll software to add $68,000 to his paychecks over four months in 2000. The defendant claims he meant to pay the money back. The jurors file in, and you take notes as the judge asks them questions. Which do you ...

Personal injury plaintiffs' lawyers have often told me they hope for female jurors — unless the plaintiff is a woman. Women judge other women harshly, the theory goes. The demographics of Anita Hill Ever since the Clarence Thomas hearings, when I was startled at how many of the female staff in my office seemed to despise Anita Hill, I've suspected ...

There he goes again. Another post from Scott Greenfield along the lines of “I love Anne Reed’s blog, but I don’t believe a word she says.” Scott was teaching at Cardozo Law School’s Intensive Trial Advocacy Program, and hung around for the voir dire session. His conclusion: “[M]y confidence in voir dire is restored. It’s still just voodoo.” It’s one ...

When you need jurors to understand new and complicated facts or concepts, you have a problem: you need to repeat the material more than once, but when you do, you're punished for it. A new and seemingly unrelated study suggests a path between the rock and the hard place. The dilemma is clear. On the one hand, you know you ...

I often find myself writing about cases where jury trials were messed up, from badly to horribly, and appellate courts forgave — or didn’t see — the problem. “This case must be retried on facts”There’s been a run of exceptions lately, though, right in Deliberations’s backyard. In the last several weeks, different Wisconsin appellate panels have looked at trials where ...

A Seventh Circuit opinion Dec. 20 requires a quick break from Deliberations's holiday break. United States v. Mendoza instructs trial courts in the Seventh Circuit on how to, and how not to, select alternate jurors in criminal trials. Alternates at random In Mr. Mendoza's drug trial in Indiana federal court, the trial judge selected alternates in a way that will ...

A single word can make a big difference, especially when the word is the main noun in a critical jury instruction. This week Mark Bennett began and Jamie Spencer continued a conversation about the pattern instruction Texas judges give when a defendant does not testify. The Texas instruction is: You are instructed that our law provides that the failure of ...

The Supreme Court is hearing argument today on Snyder v. Louisiana, another case where a prosecutor struck all the black jurors in a death penalty trial. Batson v. Kentucky says the prosecutor needed racially neutral reasons for rejecting these jurors, and the Court will decide whether the purported reasons are good enough, especially after the prosecutor invoked the O.J. Simpson ...

There's no judge quite like the Seventh Circuit's Richard Posner. Very few judges have a Facebook fan club, for example ("Richard Posner for Philosopher King," they call themselves; Judge Alex Kozinski has a fan club there too). Judge Posner's opinions have their own searchable database, Project Posner. Last December he appeared for an interview and book-"signing" on Second Life. And ...

Criminal and personal injury defense lawyers, pencils ready. Next time you ask a judge to keep gory pictures and other disturbing material out of evidence, cite David Bright. "Jurors presented with gruesome evidence, such as descriptions or images of torture and mutilation, are up to five times more likely to convict a defendant than jurors not privy to such evidence," ...

My partners Laura Gramling Perez, Chris Ware, and Ellen Brostrom, with help from a growing number of our colleagues, have unveiled a blog on all things related to the subprime mortgage crisis. It's called Mortgage Meltdown, and it covers everything from the basic ("What Is A Subprime Mortgage?") to the advanced ("FASB 157: Day of Reckoning?"). Don't take my word ...

Every once in awhile you see a "distrust" poll, ranking professions according to how much or how little people trust them. In the most recent Gallup Honesty/Ethics in Professions poll in December 2006, nurses ranked highest with 84% of respondents saying nurses' honesty and ethical standards were high or very high; car salesmen were lowest with 7%; and lawyers were ...

Read it aloud, and it sounds like any other Court of Appeals opinion: measured, calm, a little dull. But in that quiet tone, District II reached out last week to say that juries' questions about the law ought to be answered, if answers are out there. In State v. Hubbard, authored by Judge Snyder on October 24, the court reversed ...

Jury talk seems to be everywhere lately. 1. When you can't handle the truth. "[T]here is enormous freedom in trying the impossible case," says Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice in "Loser Truth," a long post about what to do when the client insists on a story that no one is likely to believe. If that weren't useful enough, Gideon at ...

Good lawyers know how much you can learn about jurors if you ask the right questions in voir dire. Really good lawyers know how much you'll never learn, no matter how perfect your questions are. Often — maybe always — the experiences that most shape our personalities and attitudes are our secrets. "We all carry a secret that would break ...

Anne Reed is a trial lawyer and jury consultant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is a shareholder at Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, SC, where she represents business clients in litigation, and assists lawyers preparing for trial through Reinhart's Trial Science Institute. For more of her blog postings about juries visit Deliberations.