Black Lives Matter and the American Juror, Part 1

Yesterday, as you all surely know, a Minneapolis jury returned three guilty verdicts in the criminal trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this trial. Many years from now, we may remember where we were when we received news of the verdict. It is a complex, emotional moment for a country traumatized and, to a certain extent, transformed by the horrifying video of George Floyd’s death last May. Tensions have been high in Minneapolis. Thousands of National Guard troops and law enforcement officers patrolled the city, and in-person school was preemptively cancelled this week in anticipation of the response to the trial’s outcome. How did lawyers attempt to select a fair and impartial jury in this climate? If you were summoned for jury duty for the case of State of Minnesota v. Chauvin, et al., you would have been asked to complete a lengthy questionnaire including, in a section addressing bias in the criminal justice system, the following question: This was not the first time that Black Lives Matter has come up in jury selection, but it was perhaps the first time that potential jurors were asked their opinions on a movement that exploded exponentially and internationally by the very events they were summoned to review. It is becoming more common for lawyers to probe support for the Black Lives Matter movement among potential jurors, which raises several legal questions. A first question, the subject of [...]