December 11, 2018
Mastering Group Voir Dire: Tip 9—Employ the Springboard Method
So far, our Tips series has focused on setting the stage for effective voir dire (Tip 1; Tip 2; and Tip 3), capitalizing on open-ended questions to increase our understanding of jurors (Tip 4), avoiding the “looking good” bias (Tip 5), crafting questions with the “bad” answer in mind (Tip 6), using questions that contrast viewpoints or positions (Tip 7), and the need to intersperse majority response questions to foster continued participation (Tip 8). Our next tip addresses the springboard method of questioning that enhances juror participation during voir dire. (Click here to see a short video for this tip.)
Fostering Participation
As I have stressed throughout this series, we need to employ approaches and methods that maximize juror participation and candor during the voir dire process. We started questioning by employing the initial background summary in Tip 2 and employed the initial hand-raising technique in Tip 3 to encourage participation at the beginning of voir dire. Our focus on participation shifted in Tip 8 to the inclusion of majority response questions to counteract nonparticipation tendencies inherent in traditional voir dire questioning. There is a potentially more effective method to maintain and increase participation—the springboard method.
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