Voir Dire

Yesterday I was summoned for jury duty. The courthouse had scheduled over 10 jury trials to start on Monday, so they called in over 200 people for jury duty. I was randomly chosen to be in a group of 30 potential jurors, out of which they would choose 12 jurors to hear a two-day felony case.

The voir dire process was quite amusing to watch from the juror side (I'd already seen it a few times from the court employee side). "Voir dire" means basically "tell the truth". Potential jurors are sworn to tell the truth and then questioned about possible conflicts or biases they have that might make them unable to be a fair factfinder in the trial at hand. One woman said she was against the way our penal system works, and a man said that it was ludicrous that the criminal charge was defined as a felony. Neither of them ended up on the jury. Shocker!