Guess what? You are innocent until proven guilty in the court of law of the United States of America. That is the way the constitution was written all those years ago by the founding fathers. So, you could kill someone and if the attorney you hire presents your case in a way that removes the criminal element from you and makes it seem like you did not do it, you are considered not guilty, then you can go home. The people that your lawyer has to convince of your not guiltiness is not the judge but the jury, who are the ones that could set you free or put you in prison.
In order to have a fair legal trial, there can be no predisposed bias in the jury or they have to be a group of people how are easily persuaded. There is a whole process of choosing a jury that you feel will produce an expected result. During normal trials, the attorneys themselves will briefly interview and choose the jury candidates they themselves find suitable to judge the defendant. This guarantees a free and fair trial; the following are some of the standards and procedures that a jury selection consultant has to go abide by and how it all works.
To begin, jury selection consultants are jury experts that come and examine potential jury candidates on a very profound level so the lawyers are able to make the correct decision when choosing who will join the jury. Meticulous research is done on the potential candidate’s social media pages in order to reveal potential biases that lurk within the candidates. Many of these jury selection consultants have degrees in psychology and sociology which makes them knowledgeable in personal behaviors which may have a negative impact on their judgment of the evidence and the defendants themselves.
It is crucial that these biases are found and expelled from the jury, because if they are present then a pervasive influence will affect the final ruling. This all ties into having a free and fair trial. A jury selection consultant will review your case file, superficially, in order to have a feel of how to go about the procedures that he or she has to take to make a correct selection. There is a strategy to how a trial has to go about and having a knowledge of what the case in question is about, the consultant can determine which strategy and points of interest should be accentuated as to swing the jury in favor of your client.
Here is South Florida, there are many of these services available to you in the Miami area; because of this many of the litigants are able to increase the positive probability of their case. Being that Miami is a city with a strong legal presence, from the law school which is provided to the people by numerous universities, it is imperative that the law is abided to justly.
A Miami jury selection consultant is usually hired when the person in question is a celebrity or a public figure which could arouse negative as well as positive feelings within the jury. As stated above, the consultant will conduct a thorough investigation into potential jury candidates in order to weed out bias from the jury, which is the number one threat to democracy. This was done for O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony, two people from different social classes that were able to arouse strong feelings in the jury, so the attorneys had to move cautiously before the trial began.
Mock trials are another aspect that jury selection consultants use in their pre-screen process for potential candidates. Here both the defendant and prosecuting attorneys give opening and closing testimonies on the case at hand and see how the potential jury candidates will respond to the case, which will give the consultant and the attorneys an idea of which direction the case will be taken. After this has been done, certain changes will be done to the case as a whole, specifically the theme of the case and the manner in which it has to be presented; of course, this is done when the case has been interpreted by the jury in a way that puts the case of the defendant in jeopardy. This is an essential service a jury selection consultant can provide to the integrity of a fair trial because it strains prejudice and bias from the jury which can mean the difference between a virtuous plea or a tainted one.
Something similar to mock trials is the focus groups which are conducted for the same reasons which mock trials are done; this service is not as attorney monitored as the mock trials are, but similarly, the case and its some points of evidence are presented to a test group simply to see how they will react to the evidence and the manner in which the case is presented to them. Here is where you see the sociological and psychological traits perform; the potential candidates or the test groups have to be analyzed in order to see personal characteristics that could jeopardize the integrity of the case.
As stated above, these steps and services are provided to clients who have a high-risk case, or a case in which could lose money and damage the reputation of a lawyer or a law firm; this service can also be included for defendants like O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony, who have or could arouse strong feelings within the jury, risking the integrity of the case at hand. Though this might be seen as tampering or manipulating the case and jury which will determine a guilty or non-guilty plea; but at times these services are needed, and used within the rights that the constitution, in order to assure that the rights of the defendant are unviolated and that the law is served righteously.
Law has been interpreted in a variety of ways; most people would consider it rules which are instituted to repress or maintain order in society, but the law, which was implemented by the founding father of the United States of America was a means by which people could defend themselves against inequity and injustice. This idea must be preserved in its entirety because without this, corrupt and injustice will run rampant. Law and all the different political manifestations which enforce the law were created so that society and civilization could be protected from corruption, inequity, and tyranny.
