Bryant case typical of excesses

September 4, 2004

Before the Kobe Bryant fiasco fades into the mists of memory, a word about the treatment of prospective jurors for his trial. The reason our interest was piqued is the 82 mind-numbing questions put to those who were called for jury duty.

As noted by Dominick Armentano, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, the irony of jury duty is that jurors haven't been charged with any crimes yet they are "deprived of their liberty and ordered to sit in judgment of those charged with real crimes. They are also subject to rigorous and personal pre-trial questioning; defendants, on the contrary, can constitutionally remain silent." Prospective jurors who remain silent, we should add, can be charged with contempt of court, fined and jailed - without any right to a jury themselves.

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Trial by jury is guaranteed by the Constitution but nothing in the document requires jury duty to be compulsory. Indeed, critics have suggested that it flies in the face of other constitutional guarantees, such as the 13th Amendment's prohibition of "involuntary servitude." Armentano would like jurors to be be hired voluntarily out of a free-labor market on the grounds it would be far more efficient and less costly.

We're not ready to go that far, but we do believe jurors deserve more privacy and respect than they usually get, especially in high-profile cases like Bryant's.

Most of the questions Judge Terry Ruckriegle ordered jurors to answer struck us as superfluous. Granted, the attorneys for both sides wanted even more questions answered, and Ruckriegle winnowed down the list. But it was still far too long. The fact the answers aren't supposed to be released to the public doesn't make the intrusion any less onerous.

Why, for instance, should a prospective juror be asked if he owns his own business (question 25), the organizations he belongs to (27), his hobbies (29) or (36) "in general, what are your feelings about the criminal justice system"?

And such questions were only half of the abuse. The reason the media were kept out of the courtroom during preliminary questioning was because attorneys also asked the jurors about their sex lives.

The questions were designed to serve not justice but the growing and dubious business of jury-selection consulting. Jury consultants claim they can help one side or the other choose the perfect juror, but their methods are undermining the legal system by intruding on jurors' privacy.

We doubt jurors need to be asked much more than whether they're citizens who live in the judicial district, whether they know the defendant, attorneys or witnesses, and whether they've already formed an opinion about the case. If they say yes to the last question, they should be asked whether a presentation of the facts might change their mind.

"Jurors need to be treated with much more respect than they are," says local attorney Paul Grant. Asking what TV shows they watch, what hobbies they have, how many kids they have and what they do for a living "is information neither side should be entitled to."

And one final question about the Bryant jury's inquisition. What does it tell ordinary defendants in ordinary criminal trials about the fairness of the nation's legal system when it takes all that extra time, money and effort to grill jurors in a celebrity case such as Bryant's?

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