Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Update from FDL: Libby trial

Pachacutec writes:

Team Irving filed a motion this morning to try to ask jurors about their exposure to particular news accounts about this case, or Fitzgerald's press conference. Fitz argues this is a way for the defense to purposely expose potential jurors with information about this case of their choosing. This is being wrangled in court out of the presence of the jurors as I type this.

UPDATE: I haven't seen this get sorted out yet, but Walton seems inclined to find a way to allow Team Irving to find a way to ask its questions.

Questioning of specific jurors is now beginning. Team Irving is asking further questions about their views on the war or the decision to go to war, if they have any problem with it or strong opinions, or just general attitudes about the Bush administration or VP Cheney. Fitzgerald says this has already been covered in the opening voir dire review, and is repetitive in individual questioning, and actually beyond the scope of direct questions about the ability to be fair. Defense is arguing people sometimes miss their checked boxes, and that this is no ordinary case and we need to probe for anti-administration biases. Walton's audio is really bad right now, but he's saying he will allow some latitude. The Libby people are also asking memory questions, repeating some of what was in the initial phase of voir dire, basically, do you think people can forget stuff?

Questioning of individual jurors is proceeding, very slowly, because there are a lot of questions and probing, mostly by the defense. At this rate, jury selection will take many, many days.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's the problem with jury selection.......very slow boring process but it has to be done that way. You would think they would have one of those fill in the dot question sheets made up for each trial and eliminate a whole bunch from there. As long as the Ryan (ex-Gov-IL)juror selection took they still had problems in the end