The Morning News / Jury Selection

The Morning News describes itself as ‘a Web-based broadsheet, published weekdays, est. November 1999’.

I bookmarked it a few days ago, but I am rather late in linking to a May 23 story on jury duty in New York:

bq. 8:00 a.m. I awake in a panic for my first day of jury duty. It takes me 10 minutes to find the three alarm clocks that began blaring at 7:30. It is light out. Who knew? I haven’t been up this early since I last did jury duty four years ago. I scarf down breakfast: half a cup of plain oatmeal.

bq. I am nervous. Spending half a week passing harsh judgment on your fellow Manhattanites just seems so… well, when put like that, it sounds just like every other day.Nice quotes:

bq. I am falling in love with the judge:
Potential juror#1: Then when I was 10, my parents moved to a suburb of Philadelphia.
Judge: Did they take you with them?

bq. Potential juror #2: Once I had my car broken into.
Judge: Was this something you arranged or, like, something that happened to you?

Voir dire fascinates me. We don’t have it in England. Here is more information (from Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago – The American Jury, Bulwark of Democracy). We used to have three peremptory challenges for each defendant, but now only the prosecution has them, and they aren’t normally used.

|voir dire |Dietl’s dictionary says: ‘voir(e) dire (“to speak the truth”) Vorvernehmung unter Eid eines Geschworenen oder Zeugen zur Feststellung seiner Eignung (dient z. B. dem Ausschluß von Geisteskranken)’|

I’ve never seen it spelt ‘voire’ and it excludes a lot more than the mentally ill. Voir dire comes from medieval French for vrai dire, to speak the truth

|challenge for cause|Ablehnung eines Juroren/Geschworenen unter Angabe eines bestimmten Grundes|
|peremptory challenge|Ablehnung…ohne Angabe von Grund|

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