The Los Angeles district attorney’s office is also reaching out for expertise. Knowledgeable sources have told Newsweek that Donald Vinson, chairman of Decision-Quest Inc. of Torrance, Calif., has joined San Francisco jury expert John Martel in advising the state. Vinson would neither confirm nor deny his role.
Both sides will face an enormous task in screening jurors. To seat a panel untainted by the massive publicity in the case, trial Judge Lance Ito will bring in 1,000 potential jurors for evaluation – 20 times the usual number. Before their courtroom interviews, they’ll fill out an exhaustive questionnaire (expected to run at least 50 pages) based on queries to be submitted this week by the dueling consultants.
The principal objective for both sides: flush out and eliminate unsympathetic jurors. It’s an especially tricky game in the Simpson case. The law permits the state and the defense to “challenge,” or dismiss, potential panelists because of opinions or interest conflicts that may affect their ability to consider the evidence fairly. The Supreme Court, however, has prohibited challenges on the basis of race or gender. Deep racial divisions in the case (polls show most blacks believe he is innocent) mean that attorneys will have to be “skillful in how they make their challenges appear nondiscriminatory,” says Litigation Sciences’ Dan Wolfe. They’ll do it through indirect questioning. The prosecution, for example, is likely to probe prospective jurors on attitudes toward police as a way of eliminating blacks from the panel.
Dimitrius, a consultant to the lawyers who won acquittals for police officers in the first Rodney King trial, says jury selection isn’t all science. She told a reporter recently that she studies potential jurors in the hallway during courtroom breaks. “I feel I’m getting paid for people-watching,” she said. But can’t a competent trial lawyer do the same thing? Los Angeles attorney Harland Braun once regarded trial consulting as “a bunch of witchcraft.” In the 1987 “Twilight Zone” case, he defended a film producer charged with negligence in the deaths of two young children on a movie set. He assumed that older, more conservative jurors would be sympathetic to the prosecution. Yet focus groups showed the opposite: that they were more understanding of mistakes. The state, without benefit of focus groups, followed conventional thinking and tried to seat older jurors as well. The defense won acquittals on all counts. Braun now calls consultants “absolutely essential.”
Some legal analysts worry that the jury system wasn’t designed to withstand this kind of skillful manipulation. “It just pushes us very far away from the concept of the jury being a cross-section of the community,” says Stephen Adler, author of the forthcoming “The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom.” Others say consultants simply help lawyers do what they’ve always tried to do: shape juries to their clients’ advantage. “Lawyers can seek help wherever they find it, so long as the lawyer makes the ultimate judgment about how to try a case,” says New York University law professor Stephen Gillers. “He can consult with psychologists or sociologists or even a tarot-card reader.” Before the Simpson jury is seated, they may all get their turn.
