Lawyers and Jurors: Interrogating Voir Dire Strategies by Analyzing Conversations

This study of individualized jury selection for 792 potential jurors across 12 North Carolina capital cases, selected with purposive case selection, analyzes the conversations that occur during voir dire to examine the process that produces decisions about who serves on juries. Lawyers question prospective jurors in voir dire partly to gather information about prospective jurors’ ability to decide a case without prejudice. Jury selection, however, suffers from what social scientists call demand characteristics. Demand characteristics provide a respondent with clues about the expected response and interfere with effective information gathering. We identified two characteristics that bear on the presence and strength of demand characteristics: the form and tone of the question. We sorted all 8,583 general legal opinion questions along a four‐step scale by combining these characteristics. We then used time‐series analyses to examine responses to these questions in sequence. Juror responses were longest and most likely to include an affective utterance when the demand characteristics were weaker, and that loquaciousness and affect fell at each step of the scale. An independent qualitative study replicated these findings, and supported the assertion that length and form are valid measures of quality in this context.