America

IT WAS not one of Hollywood's greatest efforts but the 1957 film, Twelve Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda, at least gave some insight into the behind-the-scenes deliberations of a jury. IT WAS not one of Hollywood's greatest efforts but the 1957 film, Twelve Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda, at least gave some insight into the behind-the-scenes deliberations of a jury. Angry the jurors might have been, but in those days they didn't know how easy life was. If the movie was remade in 1994, deciding whether the defendant was guilty or not would have been the least of their worries. Most of the film would be taken up showing how the 12 were selected from 300 potential jurors after intense public questioning about their politics, private life and religious views. The American social fabric has changed so dramatically in recent years that the right to a fair trial has become inseparable from the right to select who you want to serve on a jury. No longer are jury members impartial guilt-detecting robots: they are walking, talking potential enemies, imbued with every political, personal and moral prejudice in the United States today. Not only has mass television coverage of criminal cases made finding an unbiased juror hard enough, but once a relatively clean candidate has been lined up, many other social influences come into play, including race, gender, age, and opinions on everything from abortion to who is going to win the World Series. Even what tie you wear. This was illustrated last week in the trial of Jack ''Doctor Death'' Kevorkian, the Michigan physician defending his assisted-suicide practice. His lawyer announced before jury selection started that he would use his long-established right of ''peremptory challenge'' - the right to dismiss without explanation any juror he did not like - to sift out even those people who looked unsympathetic from their personal appearance and mode of dress. In the end, selection took only two days, a nanosecond compared to many high profile trials. In the second trial last year of the police officers charged with beating motorist Rodney King, jury selection took three weeks, before the first witness could even be called. Potential jurors - there were 333 of them - had to fill in a 52-page questionnaire, including views on race, inter-racial marriage and affirmative action. It must have been tempting to write positive opinions on slavery and sign the forms Josef Goebbels, thereby getting out of the courtroom early and avoiding the uncomfortable scrutiny of some very nasty types in South Central Los Angeles. In the previous trial, an all-white middle class jury acquitted the policemen and had the city burning for a week. After the debacle of the first trial, race was undoubtedly the theme of the second jury selection. But it had to remain unspoken. In a 1986 landmark ruling, the Supreme Court barred either the defence or prosecution from objecting to a juror on racial grounds. In terms of the country's social history, it was a necessary ruling, but in practical terms both King trials, and the connected Reginald Denny trial, showed that race would never be far from a lawyer's mind when it came to picking friendly juries. IN THE trial of the two black Los Angeles youths accused of assaulting white truck driver Denny during the King riots, selection took over two weeks, with another 250 candidates having to answer over 100 personal questions. No matter how many Supreme Court rulings, it is certain people will continue to be barred on the basis of their race, because lawyers can cite other excuses for objecting to their inclusion. And it by no means has to be a simple case of black and white - in the recent World Trade Centre bombing trial, lawyers managed to ensure no Jews or Muslims ended up on the jury, even given the ban on racial decision-taking. And last week, in an equally important piece of social engineering, the court did for sex what it had done for race, voting to bar exclusion of jurors because of their gender. In his opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that such exclusion ''denigrates the dignity of the excluded juror and, for a woman, re-invokes a history of exclusion from political participation''. Intriguingly, this suggested the court was thinking more of protecting the rights of the jurors than the defendants. And ironically, despite the general view of sex bias as presiding mainly in the female arena, the case which sparked the ruling concerned a man. An Alabama man who lost a paternity case objected because the prosecution had used jury challenges to ensure that all 12 members were women. Personally, if I were accused of fathering a child, I do not think I would like an all female jury deliberating over my DNA profile either. But is there a place in law for these intangible kinds of prejudice? What the Supreme Court has effectively done is to judge that there are certain types of case in which men or women are more likely to come down in favour of a certain verdict. In situations where you may expect this to be the case, however, quite the opposite occurs: the five men on the Lorena Bobbitt jury joined the women in acquitting her of malicious wounding in the infamous penis-severing case, and if reports were correct, argued the most vociferously on her behalf. There has also been a historic feeling that men are more likely than women to find guilt and push for harsh sentences in all kinds of cases; but that romantic fiction image of women acting from the heart, while men (who do not have one) use their reasoning, just does not wash in 1994 - either in the kitchen or the courtroom. In a perfect world, lawyers could trust potential jurors to be intelligent, unbiased, and honest, whatever their sex, race or background. Unfortunately, life is not like that any more, America especially so. Sometime in the future we may look forward to hand-picked juries, populated by a rare species of albino hermaphrodites, but until that day, jury selection will get ever harder, ever longer, and even crazier.