My wife recently made the final 12 on a jury. However, during the final round of questioning, she was removed from the jury by the defense, for cause. This made sense, as she's a psychologist and the case was about a repeat sex offender. On the other hand, what didn't make sense was that she got that far. She has some well-defined views on sex offenders, and she made no secret of them in earlier questioning. So how did she get so far?
Perhaps they were using JuryQuest. It's software that attempts to improve on the selection process.
That a computer program might become a vital tool in predicting juror bias is perhaps less surprising than the fact that it isn't already: The necessary mathematical formulas and attitude scaling techniques were developed by the early 20th century. To rate a jury pool, the program needs only seven pieces of information: age, sex, race, education, occupation, marital status, and prior jury service. Once entered, the program uses factor analysis to match the categories against a 4 million-item database built from survey questionnaires designed to identify authoritarian (prosecution-friendly) versus egalitarian (defense-sympathetic) bias. Source: Slate.com
According to the article, attorneys are using the program in addition to their own intuition; kind of in the way the people might match themselves up on a dating website that uses questionnaires. Still, I cannot imagine why the defense would have let her get so far. It makes me wonder if anyone was paying attention.
Perhaps they were using JuryQuest. It's software that attempts to improve on the selection process.
That a computer program might become a vital tool in predicting juror bias is perhaps less surprising than the fact that it isn't already: The necessary mathematical formulas and attitude scaling techniques were developed by the early 20th century. To rate a jury pool, the program needs only seven pieces of information: age, sex, race, education, occupation, marital status, and prior jury service. Once entered, the program uses factor analysis to match the categories against a 4 million-item database built from survey questionnaires designed to identify authoritarian (prosecution-friendly) versus egalitarian (defense-sympathetic) bias. Source: Slate.com
According to the article, attorneys are using the program in addition to their own intuition; kind of in the way the people might match themselves up on a dating website that uses questionnaires. Still, I cannot imagine why the defense would have let her get so far. It makes me wonder if anyone was paying attention.
