For most trial lawyers, jury selection begins when the courtroom deputy conducts the rollcall of prospective jurors. However, an important part of the process has already taken place before those potential jurors even enter the courtroom—the selection of the venire. Normally, this is a seamless process conducted by the jury commissioner in consultation with the trial judge. But, as with seemingly everything else, these are not normal times.

Typically, a court’s jury plan is designed to ensure that the venire meets the statutory and constitutional requirement that it be comprised of a fair cross-section of the community. The dearth of successful challenges to a jury’s composition in recent memory normally renders an appeal on this ground a losing proposition. Fair cross-section arguments are often relegated to the “kitchen sink” portion of a brief, with just enough detail to avoid the dreaded footnote dismissing the argument as “unsupported by fact or law.”