What is jury selection? 

Jury selection is the process of selecting the individuals who will serve as the jury in a civil trial.

The process of jury selection is discussed below.

What is the process for selecting a jury (jury selection) in a civil case? 

Individuals called to serve jury duty are referred to as the jury pool.

The jury pool is a cross-section of the population and each member is randomly chosen from government records.

Jurors fill out a questionnaire and submit to a background check as part of this process.

This procedure seeks to expose any biases or prior conduct that might disqualify the potential juror from service.

For example, an individual who has previously been convicted of a felony may not serve on the jury.

Once the final pool is selected, these individuals are eligible for selection to serve on a trial jury for any case in the court’s jurisdiction.

The trial jury is selected through a process known as voir dire.

In this process, the plaintiff and defendant (through their counsel) ask questions to evaluate the jurors.

The purpose of the questions is to identify any biases that may prejudice the juror’s ability to be fair and impartial in the execution of her duties.

If the questions reveal any biases that disqualify the juror from service, the juror is stricken for cause from the jury pool.

This is a procedural process to narrow the jury pool down to a group of eligible, non-biased individuals.

Then, each party is given the ability to strike a limited number of jurors from the pool for any non-discriminatory reason. These are known as “preemptory challenges“.

This allows the party to strike potential jurors that they simply do not want on the jury.

The only limitation is that the peremptory challenge cannot be used to eliminate a potential juror based upon any protected classification (race, religion, gender, etc.).