Improving the voir dire process: A prospective juror's perspective

Abstract

While the U.S. legal system takes pains to treat jury trial defendants fairly, it tends to treat prospective jurors unfairly, as if their time had little value. Citizens might view performing this important civic duty more favorably if the court made better use of their time. This article studies the voir dire phase of jury selection in California courts and investigates how it can be made more pleasant and productive from a prospective juror's perspective. A discrete-event computer simulation model of the process was built to test an alternative approach to handling jurors during voir dire, in which some are permitted to leave the courtroom and use their out-of-courtroom time as they wish, e.g., working or reading. Jurors can be recalled to the courtroom as needed via text messaging or paging, so the approach should be relatively easy to implement. Experiments performed with the model found that, depending on trial characteristics, jurors allowed to leave the courtroom would likely would recoup an average of one to 4 h, collectively recover dozens to hundreds of hours, comprising 15–30% of the total time spent by all jurors at the courthouse for voir dire, and potentially save several thousand dollars in lost income.