Impartial juries in an age of mass-media coverage

People have heard about the crime before they ever enter the courtroom. Why is that a problem?

The opening connects widespread news coverage with the difficulty of selecting an impartial jury. The usual thinking is that someone who knows about a case is more likely to have an opinion about it. Courts would prefer jurors who don't have to put prejudices aside, but extensive coverage makes those uninformed candidates difficult to find.

Imagine a heavily publicized trial involving a famous athlete. People may have followed the person for years and heard competing accounts of the alleged crime. How do you find a whole jury of people who arrive with no prior impressions? That's the problem. Now we need to see what the courts can do about it.

Moving the trial is one approach. But if the story has been covered widely, people in the new location may have heard it too. Moving a local case might change the pool of knowledge available; moving a nationally familiar story doesn't automatically make it unfamiliar.

Giving instructions is another approach. A judge can tell jurors to disregard information learned outside court. Can the jurors actually set it aside? Knowing something and being told not to use it are different from never having known it. That's the concern behind the critic's description of the required “mental contortions.”

Paragraph 3 introduces voir dire: questioning potential jurors to determine whether they can be impartial. That sounds like a sensible way to screen people, but it depends on getting revealing answers. The critics identify several ways the questioning can go wrong.

Someone may hide a prejudice because admitting it would be embarrassing. Someone else may invent a prejudice to escape jury duty. Those are opposite motives, but both make the answers unreliable. Other candidates may genuinely underestimate how much they've heard about a case. And a judge's question may signal the desired response, prompting people to give that response rather than an accurate account of themselves.

So we have a problem with the remedies as well as with the publicity. Where does that leave us?

The final paragraph reports that some countries have largely abandoned voir dire. But the writer immediately objects that removing an existing remedy doesn't solve the underlying problem. We still have citizens who have encountered information about crimes. Getting rid of the questioning doesn't make that information disappear.

Then the argument takes a turn. A truly impartial jury needs informed citizens who represent the community's collective experience—and that experience includes mass media. At first this seems like a trap: we want informed people, yet being informed may mean having opinions. Are we asking for incompatible things?

The last sentence changes the unit we're evaluating. Instead of demanding a blank, perfectly impartial mind in every juror, the writer locates impartiality in the jury's deliberation. Informed, curious, even opinionated people discuss the case together. Different perspectives can challenge one another rather than remain unexamined in separate minds.

That doesn't mean every prejudice automatically cancels an equal and opposite prejudice. We could still ask what happens if everyone shares the same mistaken assumption. But the claim we need to understand is about a collective process, not a guarantee that any collection of biases produces a fair result.

The ending therefore does more than repeat that media coverage makes jury selection difficult. It asks us to reconsider what an impartial jury is: a group reaching a decision through deliberation, rather than a collection of people who knew nothing before they arrived.