Professor Joe imparts voir-dire expertise in Criminal Trials: Theory and Practice class

By Carla Meyer

Photos by Jose Alfonso Perez

Professor Irene Joe’s Criminal Trials: Theory and Practice class offers insights into the behavior of juries that few law students – or attorneys – ever receive.

Joe teaches the class each spring to 16 students who, near the end of the semester, separate into groups of four (two defense attorneys, two prosecutors) for four mock-trial exercises. The exercises emphasize voir dire, an area in which Joe, a former New Orleans public defender, is a nationally recognized expert.

The mock trial is the final exercise in a class that is part theory, part practice. “They are working toward it the entire semester,” Joe said of students in the Criminal Trials class, now in its third year. The class fills up quickly each spring and always has a waiting list.

In the exercises, Joe plays the judge, and UC Davis students recruited from outside the School of Law play themselves, essentially. During voir dire, the defense and prosecution ask the prospective jurors about their real-life areas of study as well as their views on the criminal justice system, law enforcement and other subjects that might expose biases. The defense and prosecution strike potential jurors who do not seem favorable to their respective sides, until five remain.

The emphasis on voir dire is unusual for a law school class or even mock-trial practice, Joe said.

“It is a field we are still trying to learn more about,” she said. Jury selection is “so individualized, and jury deliberation is extremely secretive, so it is much more difficult to gain insight into how to do it effectively than with other parts of a criminal trial.”

Joe learned the ins and outs of jury selection as a public defender, and went on to teach methods for an effective voir dire to other public defenders in Louisiana and other states. Although there are many law professors with criminal court experience, it is difficult to find law professors with a significant number of trials that have gone to verdict.

Joe is unusual in this regard. The national trial rate, depending on the study, hovers around 3 percent. When Joe was a practicing attorney in New Orleans, the trial rate there was around 19 percent, studies showed.

“That means all of the attorneys in the office, myself included, were in trial all the time.” Joe said. This substantial trial experience enables Joe to engage in critical discussions about jury selection and impart her knowledge on the preferable approach. She also had gained a fairly unusual degree of perspective into juror behavior by practicing in Louisiana, then one of two U.S. states that allowed non-unanimous verdicts. (Louisiana voters rejected split verdicts in November 2018; only Oregon still has them).

“For a guilty verdict in a felony case, it only took 10 of 12 votes,” Joe said. “Sometimes, the not-guilty (voters) would be very upset about what happened in the jury room, and would be willing to chat a little bit more with the defense attorneys.”

Joe uses her old cases for her class’s mock trial exercises, which start with extensive voir-dire sessions. After that, the sides give opening arguments, and Joe offers a rundown of what happened in court during the real case. Then the jury convenes for deliberations, which the defense and prosecution watch via video monitor – a window into jury behavior that actual practicing attorneys can only wish for.

“They get to hear how their arguments came across … and it is really entertaining, because some of the students get very frustrated,” Joe said. “They will say, ‘I thought that juror was going to be for me, and I can’t believe he is so against my case!’”

In her class, “one of the things about the courts that I like to drive home is that we are not able to tell as much as we would like from the general characteristics of” prospective jurors, such as family background, field of study or employment, Joe said.

Students learned this the hard way during a spring 2018 mock-trial session. That case involved a convicted felon accused of illegally possessing a gun.

The jury pool consisted of students pursuing degrees in political science and social work. The defense was sure one student would be a dream juror, Joe said, because of how he expressed his impressions of the criminal justice system. “A lot of his friends had been wrongfully accused, and he had a healthy skepticism about how the government identifies those deserving of punishment,” she said.

But once in the jury room, this juror “was extremely friendly to the prosecution, and actually became a dominant voice for the prosecution and convinced other jurors to change their opinions,” Joe said. It was the only one of the exercise’s four sessions in which the prosecution triumphed.

In real life, Joe’s client was acquitted. But she did not mind the other side winning during the exercise, because it showed the students acting as prosecutors had absorbed her lessons about looking beyond the obvious during jury selection.

“The prosecution, to their credit, listened closely to his answers and said, ‘You know what? He probably could be good for us. He will just look for a certain type of evidence in order to feel like the state was justified in this arrest,’” Joe said.

The outcome also conveyed to students on the defense side how important the jury was to their case. “They now could understand how different groups of people can view the same evidence and reach different results,” Joe said.