Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Jury Impact in Bloomberg and The New York Times

Jury Impact is once again in the news, with Chris St. Hilaire quoted in Thursday editions of Bloomberg and The New York Times.

Here is an excerpt from The New York Times article Selecting Jury for Bonds Is Hard in Giants Country.
Chris St. Hilaire, president of Jury Impact, a jury consulting company based in Costa Mesa, Calif., said that finding a juror without a predisposition toward Bonds would be a challenge.

“Finding someone who doesn’t have an opinion about Barry Bonds is like finding a cowboy who doesn’t have an opinion about a horse,” he said, adding that the ideal juror is likely to be a casual fan who has heard of Bonds, but does not know much about him or the charges against him.

“You’d think that the perfect juror would be someone who loves baseball, but I think the worst juror for them would be a hard-core fan,” he said of what the defense might be looking for. “You want someone who can be swayed by the evidence, not by their agenda.”


And an excerpt from Bloomberg's piece Bonds Jurors Face Ban on Texting, Tweeting About U.S. Trial Under Proposal:
In what jury consultant Chris St. Hilaire called an unusual addition to such questionnaires, prospective jurors would agree in writing to an order forbidding them from communicating via social media, the Internet, “or any other form of electronic communication for any purpose whatsoever,” according to a filing yesterday in federal court in San Francisco.

“I haven’t seen it used before and it’s a recognition of the new world we live in now,” St. Hilaire, president of Costa Mesa, California-based Jury Impact, said in a telephone interview. Lawyers in the case “are trying to be specific because they know how influential social media is now.”