One of the most critical factors in assuring that a criminal defendant receives a “fair and impartial” trial heard by a “fair and impartial” jury is the voir dire process. The voir dire process represents a questioning process during which potential jurors are questioned by attorneys for each side and/or the trial judge. Potential jurors are asked a variety of questions about their life experiences, their background, and their opinions to make the determination of whether or not they can judge the evidence in a fair and impartial manner. Jurors can be corrupted in a variety of ways. Prejudice, prior experience with a similar crime, or media exposure about the case can all corrupt potential jurors, making it impossible for them to weigh evidence in a fair and objective way. The media can play a powerful influence in forming the opinions of potential jurors. As such, any potential juror saturated by one-sided media publicity about a trial is unlikely to render a fair and impartial decision.
Jurors must make a decision of guilt or innocence based only on evidence presented at trial. Nevertheless, media publicity has often influenced the attitudes and opinions of jurors toward the defendant and/or the crime allegedly committed by him or her. Dixon and Linz (2002) conducted a two-year meta-analysis of Los Angeles media and found with respect to a number of cases during that period that 12,000 defendants per year are associated with some kind of prejudicial pretrial publicity (1). Further, study after study conducted in the U.S. and presented in the literature comes to the same conclusion with respect to the impact of pretrial and during trial publicity on juror decisions. As Dixon (et al. 2002) reports, “Much of the research appears to suggest that pretrial publicity leads to an anti-defendant bias, this bias may be subtle and not easily detected, and traditional remedies seem to have little if any impact
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