Voir dire

The eye contact, like making eye contact with the witness before you start, hand movement, facial expression control, getting a curious look as soon as you get started, voice control, breathing, and more of a, more of a set piece, which the same skills carry over.

I hope we all saw that into the presentation of opening statement or same thing in even direct examination and even voir dire.

The same sets of skills, the eye contact, the hand movement, the voice control, all these things matter in every aspect of trial.

But my mentor, Dave Clark, I remember when he said to me, But I showed him my idea on burden of proof, unreasonable doubt in a criminal case.

The witnesses aren't saying things as well as they want.

This is kind of a more of a systematic way to keep control of witnesses and the procedure.

When you come in knowing certain things that you can use, like for voir dire, you have little segments that you're not just kind of running, shooting from the hip as we do so much in trial.

It's nice to have certain things you can say, okay, I know I got this because I've already practiced it.

This is an extraordinary case involving sensitive issues, the filing states.

We urge the court to exercise its supervisory powers and discretion and grant the defense request for individual sequestered voir dire and very limited counsel conducted voir dire.

All that means is questioning.

They like to use big words.

You might know the laws, but that's about as far as it goes, because I wouldn't call half of these people smart, okay? Crafty at what they do, but as far as life experience, look, let me be very clear with you folks, okay? I will not take advice from anyone who has not been poor in their life.

For prosecutors, these requests were a bridge too far.

None of the defendants' arguments warrant departing from the well-settled practice in this district court-led voir dire, prosecutors wrote on Monday.

The court is well-equipped to thoroughly question prospective jurors and appropriately filter questions prepared by the parties.

Bob, explain to me what the hell's going on.

There's some questions about this man's possible allegations of improprieties or crimes, or allegations of crimes, not true convictions, in the past, and was that revealed to the, uh, the jury in voir dire, uh, or, or to the, the attorneys in voir dire? W- w- what exactly do we know about all of that noise that people are tweeting about with about 1/10th of the actual story in their individual tweets?

So, i- i- in Massachusetts, like in most states, what they do before they send, uh, before they select a jury is they send out a jury questionnaire, and it's based on, you know, they pull up the list of potential jurors from, you know, the voting records and, you know-

Mm-hmm

Who knows? Who knows?

So, so let me ask you, Bob.

When you, when you're voir dire-ing the jury and-

No, we gotta keep going though, T.

There's some questions about this man's possible allegations of improprieties or crimes, or allegations of crimes, not true convictions in the past.

And was that revealed to the, uh, the jury in voir dire, uh, or, or to the, the attorneys in voir dire? What exactly do we know about all of that noise that people are tweeting about with about one tenth of the actual story in their individual tweets?

So i- i- in Massachusetts, like in most states, what they do before they send, uh, before they select a jury, is they send out a jury questionnaire.

And it's based on, you know, they pull up the list of potential jurors from, you know, the voting records and, you know-

... was that.

Who knows? Who knows?

So, so let me ask you, Bob, when you, when you're voir dire-ing the jury, and when-

No, we gotta keep going, though, T.

yeah.

So what the defense did, and then I'll tell you what I did, the defense filed a motion you know about the reptile right and and i don't necessarily if i'm going to do it i'm going to do it at trial i'm not going to do it in depots i don't think it goes anywhere you're just hinting them where you're going right but the defense filed a motion to prevent the reptile and all this nonsense and then they filed a motion to prevent us from talking about the amount of that are asked or at least getting people to talk about money And that's not fair because, you know, they always ask in voir dire, if you don't find for the plaintiff, how many you're comfortable with, you know, making them walk out here with zero, right? Isn't that money? So what we did in that case was we talked to the judge really limited on what we could do.

But we did ask the question when something like this, members of the jury, you've all heard cases in Florida and throughout the country.

where juries have compensated and awarded people tens of millions of dollars.

The one that says other cases have found, juries have found, you know, jury verdicts in favor of individuals injured or in wrongful death cases, tens of millions of dollars, and they really couldn't object to that.

They did object, but the judge said, you know, she already ruled on a motion in limine when they brought up trying to limit us to say nothing about money.

And if you do that, if you're trying to case and you can't mention anything about money in voir dire, you're in trouble, I think.

Unless you have the most favorable jury ever.

I love that we have guests from all over the country, East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, North and South.

This method works everywhere, from jurisdictions with unlimited attorney-led voir dire to jurisdictions with no attorney-led voir dire.

What I love about this trial result in particular is it is a straight-up, solid, six-figure result in a hard-fought case.

These are the cases we all see in our practices.

But it really worked into one of the theories of our case.

One of the themes is the weather forecast.

It was part of our voir dire in this case.

And voir dire is relatively new in Massachusetts.