How To Make 8K A Day

I know a man connected to the justice system who makes eight thousand dollars a day.

You read that right.

When he shows up in a courtroom for a client his very presence and whispered advice to the lead attorney is worth 8 thousand dollars per day. And that's on top of lots of other services he's already charged for.

He is a jury consultant.

This man has also been a good, confidential source of information for me in the past so I cannot tell you his name. But I bring this up because I want Americans to understand what our system of justice has evolved into.

The consultant's firm offers a soup to nuts menu of services and clients decide how much they want to spend. It goes without saying all the clients are wealthy - you and I would never be able to afford such "justice."

You're surely asking what the jury consultant does for all that money. Well, the minute a beleaguered client hires him the consultant's firm gets to work. They study and then travel to the trial location. They will conduct intricate door-to-door surveys of the community, getting to know the ethical, religious, family and occupational background of the potential jury pool, carefully noting every response.

The firm also works backward to fully understand how much publicity their client's case has already gotten in the local media. If it has been extensive then extra canvassing can be ordered up to try to gauge public opinion. Does the community already think the client is guilty? Would asking the court for a change of venue be the smartest course of action? If the answer is yes, and the court agrees to move the trial, then the firm picks up and re-plants its costly door-to-door activities to the new trial location. Charting all this information is an enormous amount of work but it comes in handy later if the client chooses other services from the firm's a la cart menu.

Once the jury consultants understand the moral fiber of the locale in which their client will be tried for, say, murder or a major white collar crime (think Enron) then the big honcho, the 8k guy, can give his learned opinion about what type juror should be chosen. He might decide more women should be seated or older, more professional men would be more likely to decide in the client's favor.

And as if that isn't enough service for you - hold on to your hats!

In some of the biggest cases jury consultants hire people called "shadow jurors." Remember those door to door surveys? Well, once the real jury is seated the consultant can reach back to their extensive information files and pluck out people in the community that very nearly match the real jurors.

In other words, if juror number one is a civil engineer, father of two teenagers, the firm will find a virtual clone, hire that person for up to five hundred dollars a day and have them anonymously sit in the courtroom every day. If juror number five is a young mother with an accounting background they'll find another person from the community just like her and have her sit in too.

Sometimes as many as six or eight "shadow jurors" are hired to carefully listen to the proceedings.

At every break in the trial these shadows will huddle with defense attorneys to give real time feedback on what they've seen and heard. They'll tell the lawyer if he or she is turning off the real jurors by being too harsh. They may suggest certain lines of questioning the lawyer hadn't even thought about.

It's the closest a lawyer can get to actually getting inside the minds of the real jurors.

Hiring a jury consultant doesn't automatically mean the wealthy accused will get off. Just ask Martha Stewart who hired one of the most expensive jury firms around and lost anyway. During her five months in a West Virginia prison for lying about a stock transaction she certainly must have asked herself whether the final six figure bill was worth it.

But consider the case of murder defendant Robert Durst. He admitted killing, beheading and hiding parts of his elderly Texas neighbor's body and he was found not guilty. No matter that Durst had a long history of mental instability, no matter Durst had been a suspect in another murder. The jury, hand picked by one of the top jury consultants in America, found Durst had acted in self defense.

Again, you and I could never afford such "justice."

Diane Dimond writes a weekly newspaper column on issues of crime and justice. For more visit her website at: www.DianeDimond.net

Comments

[AlexVonHussein]

In worked in a Big Law Firm and a partner in the New York office Billed 1000 Dollars per hour. He didn't need to go to court. He signed documents and presented work to directors of Companies over Dinner.

[zanzig]

What I don't understand is why anyone would participate in the surveys that make it possible for these bottom feeders to operate. If someone comes to my door asking me survey questions I usually give them very short shrift. Why does anyone answer these people and the phone survey callers?

[darker]

Our tampered-with and tained jury system is a scandal.
Who will fix this mess?

The criminal justice system is exactly that: CRIMINAL.

[booksnmore4you]

Of course, when jury duty pays less than $50 per day, you know they are from the start looking for the "right kind" of juror, i.e., who who does not need to work, typically.

[GrainOSand]

One additional nail in the coffin only makes the seal tighter and the suffocation faster. Obscene payment for driving trucks through legal holes in questionable efforts to get wealthy clients off is indicative of the broken system we are immersed in up to our neck. There never was and never will be a fair system as long as money can be used as a tool to subvert the system and as long as the wealthy and guilty are not willing to do time for crimes they commit.

OJ was proven guilty not because of the evidence presented in the trial, but because of the way he acted before the trial. If someone had killed my ex-wife, the mother of my children, someone I loved, I would have acted very different than he did and I definitely would not have been involved in a slow speed chase. Money did not get OJ off though, America"s history of brutality against African Americans did. It allowed the conjecture of conspiracy rooted in racism, presented to a mostly African American jury, to appear plausible based on historical precedence of conspiracy against those of color. For a person of color it was not a leap to think Mark Fuhrman had it in for OJ, once they heard the tapes. Law is all about precedence, so OJ walked which was a travesty yet somehow, still a precedent, of American justice.

[wndrwrthg]

under no circumstances should anything be reported about a crime until it has been decided. Eliminate pre-trial publicity and you can go a long way to eliminating these vultures. Justice should not be only for the wealthy.

[23000Days]

Thanks for the eye-opener, Ms Dimond. This certainly fortifies the notion that jurors should be appointed by the court judge and kept behind one-way glass, their names and characterizations kept secret until the trial concludes!

[Krikkit]

Unfortunately, trial by jury doesn't work that way. Because the defendent has a right to a jury trial of *his peers*, the lawyers have a right to pick and choose the jurors from a pool called to duty. So those who have the means can always stack the deck in their favor. You'd have to remove wealth from the equation to make the system balanced for everyone.

Of course, any move in the direction of barring jury consultants from the process would be descried as "unfair" by any defendant wealthy enough to afford it.