Trump on trial: Why jury selection should take longer in Georgia

That’s not typical, Jennings said.

“Typically a conflict or a bias issue that a juror asserts might be subjected to a bit more testing,” he said.

Chris Timmons, a trial attorney who teaches jury selection at Georgia State University College of Law, said a lack of probing for the sake of efficiency can narrow a jury’s diversity.

“If you get rid of everybody that says that they can’t serve on first blush, then you’re not going to get a representative sample of the community,” he said. “You end up with folks that are unemployed, or retired or work for corporations that are able to absorb losing somebody for a long period of time.”

After the initial culling, the prosecutors and defense attorneys in Trump’s Manhattan case considered prospective jurors one at a time to decide whether to use their limited opportunities to strike a juror without knowing who would be next in line, Douglass said. That also sped up the selection process, he said, because neither side wanted to waste their juror challenges in case a “worse” candidate emerged.

Timmons, a partner at Knowles Gallant Timmons, said McAfee has already indicated that he’s inclined to give Fulton prosecutors and defense attorneys an hour each in which to question prospective jurors by the dozen.

Jennings, Douglass and Timmons said the lawyers in each of the Trump trials should be mindful that some prospective jurors may have a strong interest in being selected. Some jurors may be “hell-bent” on seeing Trump either convicted or acquitted, while others may hope for a book deal based on their involvement in such a high-profile case, Timmons said.

“I think there’s a strong risk of a hung jury (in the Trump cases), because he is so divisive,” Timmons said.

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