The retrial of Raynella Dossett-Leath begins on Monday, Jan. 11. Because it is a retrial, I suppose CNN’s InSession won’t bother to cover it gavel to gavel. More’s the pity. This case is fascinating, and the retrial promises to be very different from the original trial.

• Sidebar: Every media outlet in the Knoxville, TN, region calls Ms. Dossett-Leath the Black Widow. I’m only mimicking the “legitimate media” (bloggers being illegitimate).
• Ever wonder when they started calling women accused of killing their husbands “Black Widows”? I checked the OE for the first usage of the term and could not find it there. The term was used in English by 1884 when two women were called the “Black Widows of Liverpool.” But that surely isn’t the first usage. Misogyny is millennia old. The male equivalent, I suppose, is “Bluebeard,” but a Bluebeard is a serial killer of his wives, like (apparently) Drew Peterson, while a “Black Widow” earns her title with a single accusation. Unfortunately for Ms. Dossett-Leath, she is accused in a separate indictment of killing another husband, too.

Jury Selection in a Hostile Venue

I imagine that right now legions of jury consultants are assisting both sides with the jury questionnaires and jury-selection strategies. In the land of Black Widow nurses, though, the first concern surely is finding a jury panel that is ignorant of the full story, objective, and unbiased.

• Sidebar: I call Tennessee the land of Black Widow nurses because only a few weeks ago another TN nurse (Sharron Chason) was tried for the murder of her husband. The fact that Ms. Dossett-Leath is a nurse, I believe, will work against her (for reasons I will explain below).

Any juror who has heard the defendant in this case referred to as the Black Widow ought to be excused, IMHO. The term implies serial killing to many people (suggesting that the defendant is guilty of more than one murder) and it absolutely implies guilt. However, I suppose the law doesn’t see this issue the way I do or else the trial would have been changed to another venue.

Jury Selection Everywhere

I am not a lawyer. I am not a jury consultant. I am not a jury expert. I’m just a former criminal-trial juror. Since I served as a juror, I’ve made a sort of study of jurors in the high-profile cases that make national news, and I have reached some conclusions about “juror profiling.”

And I certainly don’t believe in Abbott’s Analytic Juror Rater.

The AJR

The Analytic Juror Rater is a 1987 book by Walter Abbott. It claims to predict how any given juror will vote based on a “Cosmopolitan Lifestyle Scale” and a “Non-Authoritarian Scale.” The first of these scales is based on the assumption that economic status and social environment make a juror more or less sympathetic with certain defendants, and the second of these, obviously, assumes that some personality types are more likely to fear the state.

The Hanged Juror’s Juror Rater

The one question I would ask each prospective juror: What do you do for a living?

• First, you don’t need to ask any juror what their race is, ethnicity, age, or income. Those characteristics are fairly obvious.
• Second, you ought not to assume that if the juror looks at all like the defendant that he or she is going to be naturally sympathetic with the defendant; in fact, if you’re honest with yourself, most of us would really dislike meeting anyone who was just like we are. (On the jury with me was a woman who was very like me and I wanted to strangle her.) However, the AJR is based on the premise that everyone has biases for people like them and against people unlike them.

Okay, so if you buy my premise, then maybe you will understand why profession, career, or livelihood is the most important indicator of the type of juror any individual will make. It’s something you choose for yourself. You aren’t born being a nurse or a fiction writer.

Principle No. 1: A person who has the same livelihood as the defendant is also the person most likely to condemn the defendant.

I suspect that most attorneys think a nurse would be a good choice for the Dossett-Leath jury, but I think not. One of the issues in the trial will be the high level of barbiturates in the deceased’s blood. Every nurse (and every doctor) will know how easy it is for a nurse to obtain such drugs, while other professionals may only suspect but be willing to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt.

Principle No. 2: Most professionals are know-it-alls.

The foreman of the jury on which I served was an engineer. She campaigned for the position by claiming to have read books on how to reach consensus.  Another juror was a teacher, and she subjected us to an hour-long lecture on the definition of kidnapping.

In the first Dossett-Leath trial I believe one juror was an engineer who asked an expert witness about the theta (angle) of a bullet’s trajectory. Engineers, I believe, are good candidates for juries in which the defense is planning to argue reasonable doubt, but they probably won’t buy most affirmative defenses, including alternative theories of the crime. Engineers can’t help but make decisions all the time based on a preponderance of the evidence; an affirmative defense can never claim to have a preponderance of the evidence on their side.

Principle No. 3: Some jobs are detail-oriented, some are not.

Engineers and computer programmers are nitpickers. Copyeditors are nitpickers (I know, I’ve been a copyeditor, a computer technical writer, and a programmer). You don’t want these people on a jury that must decide a case where the defense is ambiguous. You do want them on a jury where the ambiguities work in your favor, though—as in a reasonable doubt defense. Since I would vote not guilty if I were on the Dossett-Leath jury based on what I know now, I suppose that means that nitpickers would be appalled by the prosecution’s sloppy police work and the M.E.’s outrageous conclusions.

While I’m on this subject I should note that during voir dire it would be wise to ask prospective jurors about their complete history of employment, since most of us go through two or three careers these days. In my case, they asked me about my mystery writing but not my previous technical career.

Principle No. 4: Sex stereotypes fall apart when the individual chooses a profession that’s counter to the stereotypical role (male models, for instance, and female firefighters).

Principle No. 5: Some jobs teach skepticism (reasonable doubt) while some teach credulity.

On “my” jury we had a priest (credulous) and a geneticist (skeptical, questioning, “how did this evolve”?). The priest was the last to question the prosecution.

In a highly controversial trial several months ago (which I will not mention, because I get spammed every time I do) one juror was a lawyer who, though not the foreperson, led the jury to a not-guilty verdict based on reasonable doubt about the star witnesses for the prosecution. It was then that I realized you have to be a lawyer to “buy” a reasonable doubt defense. (I don’t think lawyers are skeptics, though; I think they’re relativists, but that’s another issue.)

Principle No. 6: Some jobs require teamwork and consensus-building, some require individual initiative.

Prosecutors should look for team players; defense attorneys should look for mavericks. I suspect that most businesspeople are team players, as are most nurses. Mavericks would be tennis players, chess players, farmers, self-employed people, artists, writers—anyone who goes it alone.

Selection of the Dossett-Leath jurors is probably fraught with peril for the defense. I wish them luck. And luck is frankly what is required. They can’t do anything about the jury pool. They have to rely on the judge to excuse as many potentially biased people as possible so that they don’t use up their limited number of discretionary selections.

A good lawyer, though, knows he or she can influence the jury by asking the right questions of them during voir dire. I hope the Dossett-Leath defense team asks a lot of questions about professions.

I wish I could be there to observe the process. But I’m very happy that CNN can’t broadcast voir dire in any trial, because jurors have little enough privacy as it is.