Murder Trial Finally Started - With Motions

The judge recovered and we were back in court today. Several motions were discussed and refined the jury selection process that starts tomorrow morning. Here is what occurred today.

Jury selection starts tomorrow morning, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 9:00. The first six days of jury selection will be spent on hardship inquiry: questioning jurors whether they have a hardship in sitting as a juror for a three month trial. These six days are August 25, 27, 31, September 1, 2 and 3. 900 jurors will be brought in for hardship inquiry. 150 jurors a day (75 in morning and 75 in afternoon) for the six days.

-The jurors will be advised that they will be needed for questioning for one day in September and if selected on the jury, they will need to be available from October 12, 2009 to approximately December 16, 2009. They will then be asked if they have a hardship which means financial hardship, school hardship, health hardship or language hardship that precludes them sitting on this jury. The court will discuss the hardship claims with the attorneys and rule whether to excuse the individual jurors requesting to be excused.

-Jurors who do not claim a hardship will then be asked to fill out a juror questionnaire (15 pages long with loads of questions about the juror and the juror's attitudes or topics like the death penalty, crime, police, etc.) Those jurors will then be given a day to return in September for individual questioning on their ability to be fair and impartial in this case.

-Individual questioning of the jurors who clear hardship will start on Tuesday, September 8, 2009 and will be conducted for the remainder of the month and perhaps the first week of October(Monday through Thursday; Fridays the trial is not in session). The court granted the defense attorneys' request for the trial to be in recess on Monday, September 28, 2009 (Yom Kippur).

-The jurors will come in groups of eight in the morning and eight in the afternoon and we will question the jurors on the specific topics of death penalty, gangs, pretrial publicity (knowledge of the case), police officer-victim and race. This questioning is to see if the jurors can be fair and impartial in hearing our case. It is a lengthy and tedious process but the goal is to get fair jurors.

-The court decided there will be five alternate jurors for our trial.

-As note above, the court set the tentative date for the opening statements for October 12, 2009 followed immediately the same day with the start of the prosecution evidence. The December 16, 2009 finish date is a broad guess and it is just to give the jurors a tentative outside date for completion of the case; it might go much quicker once we get going.

-The court denied the defense motion for a lengthy statement to the prospective jurors from the judge about the history of the death penalty in California and what the death penalty and life without parole mean today.

-Without prosecution objection, the court granted the defense request for 48 hour advance notice to the other side when one attorney is calling an expert witness (for planning purposes).