This paper will attempt to do several things. The first is to provide a brief history of jury selection, the next is to look at tools professionals that select juries use, and the last is to identify the conditions under which jury selection is most effective.
"Jury science is designed to replace the attorney's guesses and intuitions about members of the venire with empirical studies that connect expected biases with actual data about the jury pool" (Barber 6).
Before they used the social sciences to assess jurors, attorneys would use speculation or "gut feelings" to determine who in a given pool of prospects would make the best jurors. Such methods are subject to personal biases, and they were often based on stereotypes (Barber 6). By using jury science, however, attorneys are better able to understand what jurors will be sympathetic to their clients. That merits further examination.
It was 1970 when jury science was first used in a trial. It involved J. Edgar Hoover and an anti-Vietnam War group made up of Catholic priests called the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives. The United States government charged one of the leaders, Philip Berrigan, and six other people with planning to blow up heating tunnels in Washington, D.C. The government selected the conservative town of Harrisburg, Pa., for its trial venue
Jay Schulman, antiwar activist and sociologist, believed that justice was not being served by the government's choice of trial venue. He concluded that the government was unfairly using propaganda and informants and that a fair trial was unlikely. He "introduced the notion of a partnership between the social sciences and the law in order to correct, or at least balance, what he viewed to be the state's inordinate advantage in trying the 'Harrisburg Seven' trial" (Barber 6). Accordingly, he set about the task of seeing that a jury sympathetic to the defendants' views was selected.
Schulman interviewed nearly a thousa...