Have jury duty? Here's what you need to know

There’s no such thing as "selecting" a jury.

Attorney Mike Wise, a former state representative who now practices civil and criminal law, says lawyers deselect jurors from a pool of potential jurors called veniremen.

"It’s more art than science," Wise said. "There’s no hard and fast rule. There are certain categories. It all depends on which side you are on. Every case is different."

Issues such as religion and profession play a strong role in whether to reject someone as a juror, Wise said.

"Some denominations are far more conservative than others," he said. "Teachers also tend to be conservative, businessmen tend to be conservative, unemployed people tend to be liberal, low wage earners tend to be more liberal if we’re talking about damages."

Wise said that businessmen tend to get out of jury duty in lawsuits by talking about tort reform.

"They start talking about they can’t award punitive damages and they can’t award x amount of damages," Wise said. "Their purpose is to get out of the jury and/or poison the mind of the remaining veniremen, and when they get excused they kind of wink at you and wave goodbye, thinking, ‘Hey, I helped you out.’"

Wise said this doesn’t help lawyers at all.

"You would have helped me out if you had stayed on the jury, because the other side has struck you, you’re gone, you’re bye-bye," he said. "I would rather have you on my jury than making some comments to poison the venire panel which would eventually become part of the jury panel."

In a civil case, a lawyer can strike, or remove, three possible jurors. In a criminal case, the lawyer can strike six.

"If it’s a capital murder case and one of the jurors says I can’t no matter what the evidence says I can never condone the death penalty, then the attorney can challenge that witness to the court and the court can determine whether or not that witness is a fair and impartial juror," Wise said. "So, if regardless of what the evidence is, that juror will not follow the evidence as presented, the judge can strike that individual and that doesn’t go against one of your six strikes."

Wise said teachers are often released from jury duty during the school year.

"If you can somehow schedule a trial for the summer, depending on what case you have, you may want to do that so you can get teachers," Wise said. "If you’re on the defense side of a civil case, they tend to be more conservative, and they think through the evidence more than other jurors because of their training and reading and analyzing. They tend to be a more deliberative body."

Deliberately getting yourself stricken from a jury only disrupts the legal process, Wise said.

"The constitution says that we have the right to be tried by our peers," he said. "It’s an invaluable duty that individuals have to ensure that we don’t go back to the Stone Age or biblical times when it was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We’re really the only country in the world that does that, that has a jury system like we do."

Travis M. Whitehead covers features and education for Valley Freedom Newspapers. You can reach him at (956) 982-6609 or at twhitehead@brownsvilleherald.com.