Eric Rudich
speaker
66 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Eric Rudich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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All the pretrial research has to be customized. It's similar to conducting a market research study, except your product is your case and you want to see how well received it will be and what you need to do to change your product, i.e. your case, to make it more receptive to prospective jurors.
Absolutely. And that's an important aspect of our work as jury consultants is to test our clients' cases and do mock trials. We're using or working with actual individuals in the trial venue who could be prospective jurors in this case. Of course, they're not jurors. And this is all done well in advance of trial. But typically, a mock trial is one or two or even three days.
And so we would have a recruiter, similar to a focus group, come and recruit, let's say, 30 or 40 or even more people to arrive at the exercise. And the individuals would be paid for their time. And they come from all walks of life. And so they might be the person who works at a bodega. It might be a secretary. It might be a teacher.
And the idea is to get a representative sample like you would in a trial jury. But we're looking to see how someone who might be a juror on this case who has similar demographic and characteristics and attitudes and experiences of a prospective juror might react to the case.
Exactly.
So the questionnaire focuses a lot on hardship and bias, which of course it should. Overall, I'd give the juror questionnaire a B because I think there could be a lot more information included in the juror questionnaire about individuals' attitudes particularly, but it certainly works for the court to determine whether or not someone could be potentially biased.
Important question is what they've heard about the case, if they formed any opinions about the case that indicate that it may not be a fair and impartial juror on this particular case. There are questions about whether they've been a victim of sexual assault. There are also questions about whether they've been accused of sexually assaulting individuals.
So there are questions on there to uncover whether someone is potentially, their experiences indicate that they may be biased and may not be a fair and impartial juror in this case.
For the defense, I would be particularly concerned about individuals who have been victims of sexual assault. And there are probably a number of individuals who say that they were victims, but can still be fair and impartial in this case. You certainly want an individual who has kind of a untraditional sexual lifestyle, for example.
Probably someone who hasn't followed the case very closely, because I think a lot of the media attention has not been very positive to Sean Combs. Someone who's not had very favorable experiences with law enforcement. For the prosecution, you would want probably the reverse.
You would want people who have much more traditional sexual lifestyle, maybe individuals who follow the case closely, who've started to form some opinions. Maybe you've seen the Cassandra video, individuals who have positive views of law enforcement.
I would want to know if anyone has been accused of committing a crime or have had negative experiences with law enforcement or mistrustful of prosecutors. So those are just a few of the characteristics I think each side will be looking for when they're selecting the jury in this case.
It's certainly how they will respond to the follow-up questions during court. It may also come down to what type of sexual assault, when it occurred, how traumatic it was for that individual.
So all those factors will come into play when determining first if they indicate they could be fair and impartial to begin with, but then also when both sides are evaluating whether or not to use one of their strikes on that particular juror.
It's true to some extent, but those are, you know, the demographic characteristics that you describe are often a product of individuals' experiences. So the extent to which certain groups have certain experiences, that would be predictive of their verdict orientation. So you may want the blue collar worker, but the question is why?
What about their attitudes, their life experiences, their value system that indicates that they may be favorable to your particular case?
Often we're retained to assist with jury selection. But for a case like this, it wouldn't surprise me if the jury consultants stayed on to work with the attorneys on, let's say, their opening statements and fine-tune their opening statements based on the research that they've done. Certainly, Jury consultants are often retained on trial to assist with preparing the witnesses for their testimony.
For closing arguments, jury consultants are working with the attorneys to help organize the evidence and organize their themes in a way that's persuasive to the jurors. So there's a lot more that jury consultants will do, particularly in a high-stakes case like this.
That would be critical, actually. So if Sean Combs does testify, he will be going through a great deal of prep. And I'm sure he's going to even be prepped just to determine if he does testify, how will he be perceived by the jury? So it certainly would not be surprising to me.
In fact, I think it would be almost a certainty that if he's going to testify, that there will be a jury consultant involved with helping prepare his testimony.
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