Jury Selection 101: Be Your Own Jury Consultant

Jury Selection 101: Be Your Own Jury Consultant [Article]

This twenty-page article is for busy lawyers like you who are preparing for a jury trial. In addition to being busy, you might have trial skills that are rusty because most of your cases settle before going to trial. Jury selection, in particular, is a daunting task even for an experienced trial lawyer.

This article will help you apply psychology to jury selection. Essentially you can be your own jury consultant. This article also links jury psychology to voir dire, opening statements, direct and cross examination, and closing arguments. You can read this article shortly before a trial begins, and be more comfortable with how to proceed when the trial starts.

This article helps you select jurors who have a psychological predisposition that will be receptive to your story of the case. The psychological types of the jurors can be identified using the profiling framework presented in this article. Those psychological types are based on the lifelong research of the late psychologist Dr. Clare Graves of Union University. Using the suggestions in this article, you can estimate the psychological types of the individuals in the jury pool based on the information about jurors provided by the court, such as occupation.

During jury selection, you can spot individuals in the jury pool who likely have a psychological predisposition against your case. After the jury has been selected, you can use your knowledge of their probable Gravesian types to tweak your opening statement so that it is compatible with the psychological types actually on the jury.

Although the typologies of Dr. Graves are the main thrust of this article, there are other concepts from the field of cognitive science that are also covered in this article. The first part of this article presents an brief overview of cognitive science, the role of memes, issues with memory, and a section titled “ Juries make rational decisions.” The second part of this article links the Gravesian typologies to those cognitive science concepts with a focus on their use in a trial. The article concludes with three illustrative cases.

The author is Dr David O’Gorman, Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is a former marketing researcher at Bristol-Myers and Marathon Oil Company. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh he became a university teacher and administrator.

His teaching and research focused on individual and group decision-making processes, and the application of Gravesian typologies in a variety of marketing and decision-making situations. This article draws on his expertise with the theories of psychologist Clare Graves. During a summer fellowship at his former employer, Marathon Oil Company, O’Gorman hired Dr. Graves as a consultant to a marketing project. During that fellowship, O’Gorman learned firsthand how to identify individuals with various Gravesian types, and how to most effectively communicate with each type.

A sabbatical gave him an opportunity to study jury selection (fortunately he lives within walking distance of the St. Louis County courts). After observing many trials, he designed a research project to test whether Gravesian types could be use to predict jury verdicts. The project predicted the verdict in civil trials at a level that was above chance (except for real estate trials, for which Gravesian predictions did not hold.)

This is a twenty-page article that includes three illustrative cases.