Women, Gimps, Blacks, Hippies Need Not Apply

In Dallas there is much that is larger than life--particularly prison sentences. In April a jury imposed 5,005 years on each of the two convicted kidnapers of Socialite Amanda Mayhew Dealey. Of course, defense attorneys pull out every stop and follow every stereotype to get a sympathetic jury. But one hint of how prosecutors manage to select vengeance-minded jurors came out recently in the liberal Texas Observer. It obtained a copy of a syllabus put out by the Dallas County district attorney's office. The chapter on "Jury Selection in a Criminal Case," written by Jon Sparling, the assistant D.A. who got the first 1,000-year sentence in the city in 1970, contained some astonishingly frank assessments of what a prosecutor should look for in a prospective juror.

Excerpts:

ATTITUDES. You are not looking for a fair juror, but rather a strong, biased and sometimes hypocritical individual who believes that defendants are different in kind, rather than degree. You are not looking for any member of a minority group--they almost always empathize with the accused. You are not looking for the freethinkers and flower children.

OBSERVATION. Look at the panel out in the hall. You can often spot the show-offs and the liberals by how and to whom they are talking. You can tell almost as much about a man by how he walks as how he talks. Look for physical afflictions. These people usually empathize with the accused.

WOMEN. I don't like women jurors because I can't trust them. They do, however, make the best jurors in cases involving crimes against children. It is possible that their "women's intuition" can help you if you can't win your case with the facts. Young women too often sympathize with the defendant; old women wearing too much makeup are usually unstable, and therefore are bad state's jurors.

DRESS. In many counties, the jury summons states that the appropriate dress is coat and tie. One who does not wear a coat and tie is often a nonconformist and therefore a bad state's juror. Conservatively well-dressed people are generally stable and good for the state.

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