In a personal injury case, the risk of having a personally affected and biased juror is high. We have all been there, in the halls of the courthouse after jury selection. You run into a colleague and he or she asks, “What does your jury look like?” Implicit in that question is, “What is the racial makeup of your jury?” By asking that question, our colleagues are attempting to evaluate whether the jury will be biased against our clients. We can attribute this question to the long-held belief that people tend to empathize more with those who look like them. Statistics show that the population of Philadelphia, and therefore its jury pool, is becoming more diverse and better educated. Due to the fact that the jury pool is becoming more diverse, it is increasingly difficult to identify an unbiased juror based solely on race.
As we attempt to identify jurors who are not racially and ethnically biased, we should consider education. Education level can be a reliable indicator of how “open to otherness” a juror may be.
