JURY SELECTION HANDBOOK: COMPANION TO CROSS-EXAMINATION HANDBOOK

Carolina Academic Press has just published JurySelection Handbook: The Nuts and Bolts of Effective Jury Selection (374 pages) by Ronald Clark and Thomas O’Toole. Jury selection can be a terrifying experience for even the most seasoned trial attorneys. Jury Selection Handbook: The Nuts and Bolts of Effective Jury Selection is a companion to Cross-Examination Handbook because jury selection and cross-examination are the most challenging of trial skills.


The book offers two perspectives on the principles and practices for conducting jury selection: that of a trial advocacy professor, who has extensive trial experience as well as trial advocacy training, and that of a jury consultant, who has picked over 200 juries across the country in state and federal courts on a wide variety of civil and criminal matters with exposure up into the billions.

The book provides practical guidance for how to prepare for jury selection; craft motions and responses to motions regarding voir dire; exercise challenges; make favorable impressions of counsel, the client, and the case; break the ice and question prospective jurors; and evaluate jurors and tap into hidden beliefs and pre-dispositions.

The book provides role-play jury selection assignments for both a civil and a criminal case that can be utilized in law school trial advocacy and clinic courses and in lawyer CLE or in-house law firm professional development training sessions.

Robust online appendices provide examples of jury questionnaires, motions and responses to motions relating to jury selection, and transcripts of a dozen complete jury selections in both federal and state courts and civil and criminal cases.

Jury Selection Handbook, like the Cross-Examination book dissects the process and highlights the strategic choices available to trial attorneys at every step of the process. This book is intended for lawyers who are acquiring their jury selection skills, veteran trial lawyers who want to refresh and expand their approaches and law students. In essence, this book provides a comprehensive view of the jury selection process that can help all attorneys get a better perspective on the strategic choices available to them at every step of the process.

TURNING POINTS AT TRIAL AND CROSS-EXAMINATION: A BOOK REVIEW

Shane Read has done it again; he has written another must-read book for lawyers and law students. Read’s latest book is Turning Points at Trial: Great Lawyers ShareSecrets, Strategies and Skills. This new work is on a par with his prior award winning books Winning at Deposition and Winning at Trial.

        Turning Points at Trial delivers exceptional trial strategies and techniques regarding cross-examination along with other phases of trial. Shane Read recruited superb trial lawyers to help with his project and set about interviewing them. Each of those talented lawyers was asked to share the trial skills that turned the trial in their client’s favor. Read gathered transcripts from these lawyers and included excerpts from those transcripts in the book to illustrate the particular trial skills under discussion. Also, Read wanted the ideas in the book to stick with the reader, and this determined which cases he included in his book. Read expressed it this way: “Learning trial skills from great lawyers in the context of these fascinating cases makes them easier to learn and more memorable.”

        Here is an example of how turning points in trial are discussed in the book. Chapter 8 Wage Guerrilla Warfare with the Expert”, which is in the part of the book dedicated to cross-examination “begins with an introduction to the trial lawyer and the case that will be used to illustrate the trial techniques covered in the chapter. The attorney is Robert S. Bennett, whom Read describes as “one of the country’s finest criminal defense attorneys and crisis management lawyers for corporations.” Following a description of Bennett’s background and the prominent clients he has represented, the chapter provides a synopsis of Zapruder v. United States, the case involving an arbitration of the government’s dispute with Zapruder over the appraisal of the film showing the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Next, Read lays out Bennett’s strategies and techniques including: setting up cross-examination in opening statement and cross-examination principles, such as narrowing cross to one or two points – “less is more”, looking for ways to make the expert look weak or not knowledgeable, and how to use the pitch of your voice when asking a question to indicate doubt or demand an agreement. For the rest of the chapter, Read employs excerpts from the transcript of the Zapruder trial to illustrate the strategies and techniques already discussed plus others. Finally, the chapter concludes with a “Chapter Checklist” summarizing: Bennett’s trial strategies; Bennett’s tips for cross-examination; Bennett’s strategies for cross-examination of expert witnesses; Bennett’s insights for hiring expert witnesses; Summary of cross of Macauley (the government’s appraisal expert); Summary of the cross-examination of Staszyn (another government appraisal expert), and Bennett’s advice for closing argument. Read’s utilizes this approach for each chapter and it is both thorough and engaging.

        In addition to covering every aspect of trial work, Turning Points for good measure has chapters on “Depositions” and “Appellate Oral Argument.” Turning Points is Shane Read’s latest engaging masterpiece on trial and appellate advocacy. Those chapters in the book that are devoted to cross-examination are excellent.

IMPEACHMENT CROSS-EXAMINATION – IT’S NONSENSE

Impeachment cross-examination helps to build your case theory only in a negative way, by eliminating competition from the opposition’s theory. As we have previously noted, a cross that reveals that the witness’s testimony is essentially nonsense is one way to impeach.

If you can demonstrate that the witness is saying something illogical, you have gone a long way toward impeaching the witness. In a horrific domestic violence case tried a few years ago, a man claimed that his wife had received her injuries by jumping from a moving car. He explained that she had been high on drugs and acting out in bizarre fashion for the past two weeks. The problem with his story, which was pointed out quite well on cross examination, was that he and his wife had just the previous night arrived in Florida on a commercial flight from Nevada. One fertile area of cross examination proved to be a line of questions on how his severely drug impaired wife got through the TSA screening to get on the plane. The defendant also had some difficulty explaining why, after his wife jumped from the moving car, he took her home, hogtied her, and stuffed her in a closet rather than taking her to the emergency room.