Juries In-depth: Choosing Who Serves

Overview

The process for obtaining a jury (and the terminology used to describe it) varies from court to court, even within the same jurisdiction. However, all jurisdictions follow a multi-stage process that corresponds relatively closely to the following:

• Legislatures specify the minimum requirements for serving on a jury and also sometimes specify attributes (like a felony conviction) that will disqualify a person from serving.
   
• The list(s) that will be used to compile the names of potential jurors are specified by the legislature and/or the court system. Most jurisdictions use a list of registered voters within the geographical region where the court is located and a list of licensed drivers, and many jurisdictions also use other lists.
   
• The court system issues jury summonses to some subset of the persons on the list, usually randomly.
   
• Some of the citizens who are summoned appear at the courthouse for jury duty; others do not receive or improperly ignore the summons; others postpone their service (if this is permitted); and still others (in some jurisdictions) fall within categories by occupation or status that the legislature has exempted from jury service, at their option. (In some jurisdictions, including many federal district courts, those who are summoned fill out and mail in a questionnaire before reporting for duty.) The citizens who appear at the courthouse in response to the summons are collectively called “the venire,” and an individual is called a “venireperson.”
   
• The venirepersons wait at a central location at the courthouse, where they often fill out a questionnaire that will later be used by the attorneys during jury selection, if that venireperson is called as a potential juror. The venirepersons wait until some of them are randomly selected to be sent to a courtroom where a trial is about to proceed. This group is called the “venire panel” or the “jury array.” The venire panel always includes more persons than the number who will sit on the jury  to enable the attorneys to exercise challenges and to allow the court to empanel alternate jurors (if needed). (Alternate jurors hear all the evidence and can substitute for a juror who becomes unavailable before the jury begins deliberation.)
   
• The judge will determine whether there are members of the venire panel who should be excused for personal hardship reasons. The possible hardship reasons are many, and a willingness to accept them varies from judge to judge.
   
• The judge and/or the attorneys will conduct “voir dire” of the remaining venirepersons; that is, they will question the venire panel members to obtain more information about them. After obtaining as much information as the judge permits, a venireperson may be challenged by either party “for cause,” that is, for some reason upon which it is believed that the venireperson cannot consider the case with an open mind. The judge decides whether to permit a challenge for cause. In addition to an unlimited number of challenges for cause, each party is accorded a specified number of “peremptory” challenges that the party can use to remove venirepersons for reasons known only to that party, although the reasons are not supposed to be based on the race, ethnicity, or gender of the challenged venireperson. The judge has no power to disallow a peremptory challenge unless the judge determines that it is being exercised on one of the three nonpermissible bases of race, ethnicity, or gender.