Essay On Jury Selection

Jury selection begins in the community, forming a panel or venire. It starts before potential jurors arrive at the courthouse, as officials assemble a panel, or venire, of prospective jurors. All states and government have their own procedure for determining the panel but there is a general rule that they all follow. The selection must neither systematically eliminate nor underrepresent and subgroups of the population. As recently as fifty years ago the jury was comprised of homogeneous, middle aged, and well educated white men. Some reforms that were made in the judicial and legislative jury selection process. The U.S. supreme court and the congress established the requirement that the pool from which a jury is picked must be a representative cross section of the community. …show more content…
It also makes the all-white jurors more factual and more aware of racial concerns when in a diverse jury. Another policy is the appearance of legitimacy, rather than to the jury’s actual fact finding and problem solving skills. Which means juries should reflect the standards of the community. The jury selection process then continues on into the courtroom, called the Voir Dire process. Once the prospective jurors are chosen the selection process changes. The focus shifts from representativeness to questions on whether the given jurors have the ability and willingness to be fair and impartial. Then, as part of your constitutional right to be tried by an impartial jury, the defendant has the right screen prospective jurors to determine whether any of them are prejudiced. This process where they question the prospective jurors is called to Voir Dire Process. This process is conducted in many different ways, depending on the judge and their rules. For example, “Who asks the questions,” “What is asked,” “how long they are phrased,” “how long the questioning goes on for,” and “whether the questions are asked to individual jurors or to a group,” these are all left up to