R. Kelly Trial Offers Lessons About Avoiding Jury Service
Despite days of voir dire, lawyers in the R. Kelly child pornography trial in Chicago are still nowhere close to having a jury selected. In fact, the Chicago Tribune says in gavel-to-gavel coverage by the newspaper, all the dismissed prospects have provided ample material to write a book, How to Get Out of Jury Duty without Really Trying.
Although some prospects were eager to serve or said they were big fans of the 41-year-old Grammy-winning R&B star (a red flag for dismissal), many others offered reasons why they would not be good jurors ranging from standard-issue concerns about being fair to the defendant and interference with work and personal commitments to one-of-a-kind excuses, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Among the most effective avoidance maneuvers: One man simply didn’t appear, prompting deputies to call his mother in an effort to locate him.
“She told the court that she didn’t know where her son was and that he hadn’t been ‘right’ since he was shot in the head a while back,” the newspaper reports. “The judge and attorneys agreed to let him off the hook.”
Other prospects dismissed by Cook County Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan included a police officer, a physician, a woman who is to be married in June, parents of teenagers who said they would have a hard time trying to be impartial to the defendant and several individuals who said they thought the age of consent to sexual activity should be lowered.
As discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post, Kelly faces up to 15 years in prison if he is convicted of having sex on videotape with a girl as young as 13. His trial, which had been delayed for six years for various reasons, began May 9.
