Alabama Personal Injury Trial Part One – How The Jury Selection Process Works
At the beginning of a trial, a group of potential jurors will be brought into the Courtroom and all the lawyers will be allowed to ask various questions to the potential jurors. This is to find out if there is a bias that would cause the Judge to exclude the potential juror, but more importantly it is to find out the attitudes and experiences of the potential jurors.
In this part of the trial, your lawyer will ask questions seeking to understand different attitudes and beliefs and experiences of each particular juror. For example, if the lawsuit involves a semi-truck which ran the plaintiff off the road and paralyzed the plaintiff, then it’s important to understand each potential juror’s experience with driving next to large trucks and also dealing with paralysis. Perhaps one juror has a friend who was paralyzed and he has a certain mindset about that and somebody else has an entirely different mindset. There is no right or wrong answer that a juror can give - what we want is a truthful answer, so that we can seek to understand.
Every person has biases and prejudices. Any one who claims to have no bias and no prejudice is simply not telling the truth or is a truly unique human being. What we try to accomplish in the jury selection process is to understand those biases and understand those prejudices so that we can ask a question that may get the potential juror thinking about their own bias and prejudice so that they can set that aside and truly be fair and render a fair verdict.
This part of the trial is critically important and is the first opportunity we have to directly speak to the jurors, and it is our only opportunity to interact with the jurors.
We will continue this series by going through the various parts of a personal injury trial in Alabama, so as to give you a good overview of what will happen if your case proceeds to trial.
