Other Jury Consultants Methods

Shadow Juries and Mirror Juries
Consultants will try to hire individuals whose demographics resemble the actual 12 jurors chosen at the trial and have them sit in the back of the courtroom during the trial, leaving the room whenever the real jury does. Each evening, or often at certain breaks during the trial, they will meet with the attorneys who have hired them in an attempt to evaluate how the case is proceeding. This is extremely time consuming and can be very costly as well.

Miscellaneous Research
Other services of questionable value have been employed by attorneys and jury consultants to predict jury behavior. These include the use of reputed experts to assess jurors by their appearance and mannerisms and to assess the positive or negative input the defendant or his attorneys appearance may have on the jurors.

One noteworthy article suggests that ugly appearances are detrimental and that a defendant ought to have the right to be allowed a handsome substitute to sit in their place during the trial. See David L. Wiley, Beauty and the Beast: Physical Appearance Discrimination in American Criminal Trials." 27 St. Mary's L.J. 193, 234 (1995).

If the defendant is African-American it has been suggested that placing at least one African- American on the jury might suppress the open expression of racial prejudice. Valerie P. Hans and Neil Vidmar, Judging the Jury, 50-51 (Plenum Press, New York, 1986).

These and other areas of analyzing potential jury behavior are beyond the scope of this article except to say that extensive literature exists involving studies and theories on jury behavior. It should be admonished that these analyses, like other attempts to predict or understand complex human behavior, are prone to substantial error. Even professional people watchers, like psychiatrists and psychologists, have produced a statistically poor track record.