Who Gets to be a Juror

Answer:

The question of who gets to be a juror in a personal injury case is very random. There’s an Ada County Jury Commissioner that has the job of summoning all the jury panels for all of the trials taking place in the county courthouse. It’s then random from all of those people that are selected for jury service that week to be assigned particularly to courtrooms. It’s purely random.

In a personal injury case in Idaho, usually, if you’re talking about one party versus one party, the jury commissioner will arrange for something like 40 or 50 people to be submitted to this process of picking the jury, which will be whittled down to the 12 people that are actually assigned to the jury. There’s a process called Voir Dire in which the lawyers get the opportunity to talk directly to the jury in a question and answer type session for the lawyers to try to elicit from the jury panel enough information about them that they can make a fair determination as to whether the person is reasonably likely to be fair, or they might be biased against you, or biased for you. The obvious object of it in reality if you just take a step back for a moment is to get a fair and objective jury who’s able to put aside any prejudice and come up with a fair and just result.

Who is chosen as the actual juror? It’s random. It’s several steps along the way until they’re actually in the courtroom. Then it’s also random as to which are going to be the 20 or so from which the jury is actually selected. Then from there, it’s a matter of the jury – the lawyers deciding which jurors they do want or they don’t want.

At the moment, every party has the right to four what are called peremptory or automatic disqualification of juries. You just literally write on a piece of paper that you don’t want juror Number Seven. Then other side then writes, we don’t want juror Number 12. Like that, it gets whittled down that way. Otherwise, it’s generally a pretty random process.