Scaled Questions During Jury Voir Dire Allow Jurors to Express Themselves

From the Art and Science of Defending People at the http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/


Make up some scaled jury voir dire questions about issues in your case.

For example, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most important and one being the least important, how important is ______________________ to you?

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being most important and one being least important, how important is it to you that the guilty be punished?

On the same scale, how important is it to you that the innocent go free?

The difference between the two numbers may indicate a juror tendency and help in making a decision on whether to strike a juror.

Scaled questions help to draw some information from those silent jurors who might not have said much during a general voir dire. They get information from people (even people who have not been warmed up with a proper voir dire) in a way that binary (yes/no) questions never will. Scaled questions allow jurors to be more honest about how they really feel about a subject instead of the "yes" or "no" answers. With scaled questions, there may be a socially deprecated answer at one end of the scale, and the juror's perception that this answeris "wrong" might skew his self-evaluation toward the other end of the scale, but there will still be several choices that might reveal something about the juror. For example, if he is asked to rate his feelings about a subject on a scale of 1-10 and his true feeling is a 10 (which he thinks is "wrong"), he can rate himself a 9 or 8. By contrast, if the juror is asked a "yes/no" question and his true feeling is "no" (which he thinks is "wrong"), he can only answer "yes."

Make up some scaled questions ---- On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the strongest feelings and one being the least, rate your feelings about ------ _____________________?

For further Jury Voir Dire Information and ideas: http://www.bennettandbennett.com/blog/

Yours in the Law and Defense, Glen R. Graham, Attorney at Law, Tulsa,
http://www.glenrgraham.com