Jury Panel Quotes

The panel was selected from the voting rolls, and, since candidates running for office seldom represent the interests of Black and poor people, Blacks and the poor don’t vote. But failing to vote means they don’t sit on juries.

The jury convicted him, the government urged life in prison, but the judge gave him only seventeen years and four months, citing his “harsh” imprisonment in the brig and noting that “there is no evidence that [Padilla] personally killed, maimed, or kidnapped.” The government appealed to the Eleventh Circut, where a panel, voting 2–1, ordered the judge to lengthen the sentence.47 Without the torture, he might have gone away for life. Humane interrogations have a long record of success, suggesting that he might have talked anyway. Or, if not, investigators would have been forced to investigate, nail down the facts, and prove his guilt—if he was actually guilty. Once again, torture was a substitute for hard investigation.

Publications aren’t the only forms of expression now governed by Hazelwood’s ruling that speech can be limited when administrators claim ownership of the statement and think it’s “unsuitable.” Courts have applied the standard to plays, homework assignments, team mascots, and even cheer-leading.62 A cheerleader in Texas was kicked off the squad after she refused to cheer for a basketball player whom she had accused of sexually assaulting her at a party. (He and another boy had been arrested, but a grand jury had refused to indict them.) Her suit was thrown out by a federal district judge and a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit, which cited Hazelwood among other factors, noting, “In her capacity as cheerleader, [she] served as a mouthpiece through which [the school] could disseminate speech.” The school, the judges ruled, “had no duty to promote [her] message by allowing her to cheer or not cheer, as she saw fit.”63

We organized ‘The Great Indian Poetry Contest’, an international poetry competition. It was judged by an eminent panel consisting of Kalki Koechlin and Kausar Munir. It was an extensive process which started in May 2018 and took several months to conclude. It included multiple rounds of screening, reading and re-reading the poems on various levels, discussing and arguing our choices of winners, reasoning out each selection with the jury, and finally declaring the results in November 2018.

The blue-ribbon panel of 150 potential jurors selected for the Irwin trial, however, consisted entirely of men. When Leibowitz protested, he was informed by Frederick H. Cahoon, Acting Commissioner of Jurors, that, while women now had the option to serve on juries, they were “barred from membership on special panels of talesmen for murder trials.” Leibowitz immediately declared that “the procedure was not legal” and that “if Irwin were found guilty of first-degree murder, he would make the exclusion of women talesmen the main contention for a reversal.”15

I have always believed that the quickest way off a jury panel is to announce that you are convinced that all cops lie or all cops are always right. Either way, a closed mind is a challenge for cause.

It may baffle outsiders why poets would be so ingratiating, since there is no audience to ingratiate us to. That is because the poet's audience is the institution. We rely on the higher jurisdiction of academia, prize jury panels, and fellowships to gain social capital. A poet's precious avenue for mainstream success is through an award system dependent on the painstaking compromise of a jury panel, which can often guarantee that the anointed book will be free of aesthetic or political risk.

like the looks or body language of a certain Methodist, he could dismiss him for no reason. If Miles Truitt suspected an acquaintance of the Banning family might be sandbagging, he could invoke a challenge and the person was gone. The four lawyers sat perched on the edges of their chairs and watched every twitch, smile, and frown from the jury pool. Judge Oswalt preferred to take control of the selection of his juries. Other judges gave the lawyers more leeway, but they usually talked too much and tried to curry favor. After an hour of skillful questioning, Oswalt had trimmed the panel to forty-five and he yielded the floor to Miles Truitt, who stood and offered a big smile and tried to seem relaxed.