St. Thomas Law Review
First Page
253
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Everyone who believes in the jury system agrees that jurors should be impartial. However, voir dire as it is currently practiced in the federal courts has many systematic defects that do not always guarantee jurors' impartiality. For instance, when a juror lies during voir dire--even about a matter in their past that is remarkably similar to the case or issues at bar the current federal standard only focuses on the subjective purposefulness of that juror's dishonesty. The flaw in this approach is that it misses the point of due process: impartial, but not necessarily unintentionally dishonest, decision-makers. This Article deals with this problem by proposing a different standard to gauge the partiality of jurors who have not been wholly honest during voir dire. This Article argues that courts should adopt a new standard for dealing with post-voir dire findings of juror dishonesty: a two-part sliding scale standard to evaluate jurors for bias, rather than merely for dishonesty. This standard would instruct courts to consider: (1) the circumstances surrounding a juror's concealment of information and the subsequent likelihood the juror made an honest mistake; and (2) the materiality of the nondisclosure. This approach would more faithfully execute the dictates of the Sixth and Seventh Amendments by focusing on whether the juror in question was, in fact, impartial, rather than focusing almost exclusively on the question of dishonesty.
Recommended Citation
Joshua S. Press,
Untruthful Jurors in the Federal Courts: Have We become Comfortably Numb,
21
St. Thomas L. Rev.
253
(2009).
Available at:
https://scholarship.stu.edu/stlr/vol21/iss2/6