As you acknoledge yourself, the difference between inexact psychological profiling of jurors at voir dire and having a couple of attorneys with laptops sitting in the back of the room googling each juror's name is one of degree, not of kind. To the extent that fire can/should be fought with fire, then providing criminal defendents with the means to do their own online juror vetting would clearly restore some degree of balance to the system. But if the bar for effective counsel generally is so low, I don't see any reason to expect that courts will bat an eye at resource-disparity in voir dire, given that they have done nothing about prior forms of psychological profiling. Setting up an organization to carry out jury vetting for public defenders would be great, but how do you fund it?

During class, Eben seemed to suggest that the action may not be during voir dire in any case: if a prosecutor can arrange for only sympathetic jurors to be called to jury duty in the first place, then nothing a defense attorney can do at voir dire will make any difference anyway.

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 16 May 2009

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 16 May 2009