Jury selected in Boston Marathon bombing trial
, Source
It took two months to seat a jury in the Boston Marathon bombing case, but today the ten women and eight men were finally selected after the prosecution and defense in the trial spent an hour passing back and forth, in near silence, a form on which they could take turns crossing out the jurors they did not want. The sides each got to strike 23 jurors off a preliminary list of 64 people the court had found “provisionally qualified.” At the end, ten women and eight men, including six alternates, were left standing – and were asked to remain briefly for a discussion of “logistics,” as the judge put it. The 46 people who were struck from the roster left the building in what seemed like giddy silence. Only one man whispered “thank god” when the elevator doors opened downstairs.
The resulting jury appears to be all white, and, like the original jury pool, mostly middle-aged. State and city employees seem overrepresented, possibly because they do not risk their livelihood by serving on a jury for several months. At least one person expressed great doubt about being able to vote for the death penalty when he was questioned during the voir dire process, so the defense may have the one vote it needs to secure a sentence of life imprisonment for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Probably the most surprising choice is a young man who during the voir dire process seemed to irritate or perhaps puzzle Judge George O’Toole. Juror 441 is a very young man – perhaps a year or two older than the defendant – who said he had been unemployed for several weeks since he was fired “for productivity” from his job as an auditor. He seemed entirely unconcerned about the prospect of having his job search delayed by months – indeed, he seemed eager to serve on the jury. He answered questions loudly and overenthusiastically, assuring the judge that he “would have no issue” with the possibility of the death penalty. Asked if he could personally vote for capital punishment, he exclaimed, “Yes, absolutely!”
The defense has seemed generally leery of jurors who seemed particularly eager to serve. There can be any number of reasons to be eager: some people are bored, some want to write a book when the trial is over, but some may also want to be the ones who exact vengeance by sentencing the Boston bomber to death. But at least one other eager juror has been chosen. Juror 286 is the general manager of a restaurant, and she said, “It’s an important thing for someone like me, who hasn’t gone to college. I was a waitress for years…. I feel the same way every time I come out of the voting booth.” Though this woman said she doesn’t generally like excessive responsibility – she experiences being a manager as a burden – she seemed to have no issue with the responsibility of possibly choosing Tsarnaev’s punishment. “It doesn’t bother me,” she said. “I guess I don’t really feel that I’m sentencing someone to death or to life imprisonment – it’s their actions that did it. It’s like at work: I fire people, they ask, ‘How can you do that?’ But I’m not the one doing that, they did it by their actions, not coming to work, stealing, or whatever.”
The best hope of the defense may lie with two people: Juror 588, a bookstore saleswoman who is opposed to the death penalty, though she said she would be willing to consider it; and Juror 35, an older man who works for the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, who said he does not have an opinion on the death penalty, but also answered “not sure” when asked if he could actually vote for it.
Only three of the 18 jurors indicated that they came in thinking that the defendant is guilty – meaning that 86% of the people chosen are undecided; only 27% of the initial jury pool had said they were unsure of Tsarnaev’s guilt. Those who believe him to be guilty apparently convinced the judge and the lawyers that they could put their preconceived notions aside in order to consider the evidence. But at least one of the 18 seemed unable to forget what she thought she knew about the case even during the interview. A few minutes after being told by the judge that she would have to start with a clean slate, Juror 229, a middle-aged woman who works as an events planner, said, “From what I saw on TV, I suppose we knew that he was involved.” The defense may have chosen not to strike this woman from the list because she was once employed as a social worker with troubled children, and majored in psychology in college. Asked by a member of the government’s team how long she thought adolescence lasted, she said that the word may apply to people as old as 28 – a position that may prove useful for the defense.
Late last week the defense filed another in a series of hopeless motions aimed at preventing the start of the trial. This one identified a surprising flaw in the jury selection process: the defense claims that the court has violated the important randomness requirement. When notices were originally sent out to potential jurors, these were picked at random and numbered sequentially as names came up. But when they reported to the courthouse to fill out their questionnaire in early January, court staff assigned them new numbers.
This explained why, during the voir dire process, jurors sometimes seemed to come in clumps: several North Shore residents in a row, or several people from the southern part of the state, or even gay people one after another. (Potential jurors were asked what their spouses did and several were in same-sex marriages.) But the re-numbering explained it. People arrived at the courthouse in groups, as their commuter trains arrived at Boston’s South or North stations, which are roughly equidistant from the courthouse. People who came by subway from the city of Boston itself came last because the subway runs more often than the commuter trains.
People who came by car, braving the near-total lack on on-street parking and prohibitive garage prices, would have been sprinkled in-between users of public transportation. Sure enough, statistical analysis commissioned by the defense found that Boston residents were pushed back by the re-numbering. Urban residents are more likely to be people of color and to be younger than people from outside of Boston – and the analysis found that both of these groups were pushed back in the line, in addition to being underrepresented in the jury wheel in the first place.
It is not clear what impact the re-numbering could have ultimately had on the final selection process: the court conducted personal interviews with jurors ranging in assigned numbers from 4 to 697. But for whatever reason, the jury as finally selected is weighted heavily toward those who would have arrived earlier: the first hundred or so numbers of each grouping of jurors.