NCJ Number
133246
Journal
American University Law Review Volume: 40 Issue: 2 Dated: (Winter 1991) Pages: 665-701
Date Published
1991
Length
37 pages
Annotation
To provide empirical evidence on the absolute or relative effectiveness of judges' and attorneys' voir dire challenges as a remedy for prejudicial pretrial publicity, voir dire judgments were solicited from as large, diverse, and representative a sample of experienced criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, and trial judges as possible to learn whether voir dire could work effectively when nearly everyone in the community had seen pretrial publicity.
Abstract
The key question was how effectively bias due to exposure to pretrial publicity could be eliminated through voir dire judgments. The effects of exposure to prejudicial pretrial publicity survived the simple exclusion of jurors who admitted that it might be difficult for them to disregard completely such publicity, but those who made such an admission were no more likely to convict than those who did not. When all causal and preemptory challenges to define the pool of jurors who would survive the voir dire were combined, their verdicts were not comparable to jurors never exposed to the publicity. Challenged jurors demonstrated as much bias as jurors who had not been challenged. The bias created by the publicity survived voir dire unscathed. 135 footnotes