But the ritual of choosing the jury got off to a slow start as more than half of the first group of 96 potential jurors raised their hands to say they could not be fair to Mr. Trump, demonstrating the challenges of picking an impartial panel in a city where the defendant is widely loathed. The judge immediately excused them.
Yeah the thing is though that if they can prove they did that on purpose the juror can be tried for perjury for lying during their juror questioning, which is specially crafted to ask “is there any reason at all you will rule against the evidence because of your personal beliefs, yes or no?”
If they answer yes, tossed, if they say no and get on the jury then proceed to do it, they just lied on the stand and are exposed to prosecution, and I’m pretty sure the case can get retried.
I’m curious how often that’s happened. It sounds really tricky to prove someone’s motivation in that scenario.
They openly prosecute people for handing out literature on jury nullification around court houses, and they also will consider an entire jury pool spoiled if someone declares their knowledge of jury nullification. Anecdotally there’s an Ask Reddit thread out there where someone recounts a man being hauled off for prosecution because he declared he was going to just vote guilty whatever the evidence said because he wanted to get out to pick his daughter up from school, and that judge read the bastard the riot act frontways and back over it too.