Kaua’i is not a big place. Although it seems crowded most afternoons on Kuhio Highway, there are not quite 60,000 residents sharing the island. The rest are visitors. That can make it difficult for both prosecutors and defense attorneys to
Kaua’i is not a big place.
Although it seems crowded most afternoons on Kuhio Highway, there are not quite 60,000 residents sharing the island. The rest are visitors.
That can make it difficult for both prosecutors and defense attorneys to convene a jury of the accused’s peers that doesn’t include a few family members or high school classmates.
But Kaua’i County chief deputy prosecutor Craig De Costa said there are ways around the difficulty.
“For the more serious cases, they just call more people. And on several of the murder cases, we do individual (juror) questioning,” De Costa said.
But accommodations are made on Kaua’i that aren’t made in larger places.
“Just knowing someone or being a distant relative of the defendant doesn’t automatically get you kicked off” a jury, De Costa said. “You have to be closely acquainted. But it is something you are always concerned about” as an attorney.
A bigger problem for run-of-the-mill cases, according to De Costa, is that attorneys only receive about 20 minutes to question potential jurors.
De Costa said judges here often do the general questioning of potential jurors, a process called “voir dire — to speak the truth.”
“The day before the trial we are given a list of names” of jurors that includes information such as where they work, De Costa said.
He recalls, “I did have a potential juror once say in front of everybody (the entire jury pool) that the defendant ‘is my buddy. Of course he tells the truth.’ He was excused, but I worried about that” throughout the trial.
De Costa’s boss, Prosecuting Attorney Mike Soong, said he doesn’t worry about the shallow jury pool.
“We don’t generally have any problems. You may know of somebody but just to say hi to somebody. Now if they know somebody from church, we might ask them, ‘Would this make you uncomfortable?’ Some people say yes” and are excused, “and others say, ‘No, I will do my job as a juror no matter what,’ ” Soong recounted. “No, it’s not something we have a lot of difficulty with.”
From the other side of the courtroom, things look quite similar to public defender James Itamura.
“There are always people I know on juries. Often they are from my church,” Itamura said.
He noted that if a potential juror is familiar with the accused, that doesn’t immediately disqualify them.
“They are asked the question, ‘Can you be fair and impartial?’ They all say yeah, of course. Who’s going to admit they can’t be fair? You don’t really pick a jury. You can weed out some, but it’s also luck,” said Itamura, who averages six or seven jury trials a year. “I’m not going to (disqualify a potential juror) because of a gut feeling. You don’t know, you might get somebody worse.”
There are 26 jurors in the pool for a class C felony. Murders and other felonies have bigger jury pools for the attorneys to pick through.
Jury selection doesn’t always go according to plan for the attorneys, though.
“Once in Honolulu, the prosecutor was asking (potential) jurors a very convoluted question that had something to do with pies. If I told you I had an apple pie, and on and on. The juror looked completely flustered. So he moved on to the next (potential) juror and said, ‘Did you understand what I was saying?’ And that juror said, ‘You’re not going to ask me that pie question, are you?’ ” Itamura said, laughing.
TGI staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and mailto:dwilken@pulitzer.net
