Jury Selection: One for Defense Lawyers

One of the duties of the defense lawyer during jury selection is to identify those jurors with an anti-corporate bias. In the National Law Journal, Ken Broda-Bahm and Kevin Boully identify three types of anti-corporate bias, the moralists, the egalitarians, and the individualists. Each type bears a different, though related, type of anti-corporate bias.

Details are in the article, "How to Deal With the Many Types of Anti-Corporate Jurors." According to the authors:

Targeting the most extreme anti-corporate individualist in jury selection is critical. While some potential jurors will not necessarily give full voice to their attitudes on too-powerful corporations in voir dire, several questions can be used as markers of those attitudes:

• "How many of you have ever worked for a company with more than 500 employees?"

• "Who has ever served in a management position, supervising others?"

• "Who agrees with the view that the government should more closely regulate corporations?"

Questions of this sort may also be useful for plaintiffs' counsel, who will be working to preserve the very sort of juror the defense counsel is hoping to strike.

Comments

[MD]

This commentary is out to lunch. I read the questions and say yes to all of them - yet I hold no illusions about corporations. Anyone who has worked in a large corporation knows how disorganized and inept they are.

I don't think corporations are cynically evil. Rather, corporations tend to squeeze out intelligence and concern unless the management chain is firmly hands-on. Through apathy and fear of making decisions, most corporations dig themselves into predicaments that smart and timely management would have avoided.

Corporations don't cynically decide to push lethal pills, for example. The culture just makes it difficult or careercidal to be the one that says "let's reconsider this and do something that may be right but will hurt the bottom line." Apathy and buck passing are safer than making hard decisions.