Jury selection especially tricky in Jewish Federation shootings trial

When the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle was stormed by a gunman in July 2006, the allegedly hate-fueled shootings made international headlines.

With one female federation employee dead and five others wounded, bloggers and opinion writers labeled the accused shooter, Naveed Haq — of Pakistani descent — a Muslim terrorist. Religious leaders held joint services to unite thousands of shaken community members. The event even generated entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Haq, 32, is headed for trial next week on charges of aggravated first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and a bevy of other counts, and prosecutors and defense attorneys are now wrestling with the legacy of all of that publicity as they attempt to pick a jury to decide Haq's fate.

Haq has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

It is a process that, like the judicial system itself, is both formal and surprisingly adversarial: While the goal of the court is to find a panel that will be fair, the goal of the attorneys is to find one that is most likely to believe their side of the story.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys use all their wiles to find a dozen people who say they can remain unbiased in the face of what they may already know about the case from news reports.

In cases like this, they often hire consultants to help them sniff out prospective jurors they like — — and those they don't.

Haq's defense has been joined by a jury consultant in the courtroom this past week.

Fear of appeals and the educated guesswork involved in decoding a prospective juror's inner thoughts complicate the process, experts say, spurring attorneys to spend hours crafting detailed questions for a written juror questionnaire and creating complex charts to track the answers, values and even in-court behaviors of prospective jurors.

Any small detail — even what type of medication a juror takes or where he or she grew up — could be an important clue.

"You can lose a case in jury selection," said Lisa Marchese, a former King County prosecutor. "One mistake, one wrong choice, and it can affect the entire outcome."

More than 3,000 registered King County voters — an unusually large group — were initially summoned as prospective jurors for the Haq trial. That pool has been whittled down to fewer than 100 over the past three weeks. Beginning Tuesday, attorneys will further pare that group to a dozen or so.

While the expansive media coverage of the case, the terrorism-charged post-Sept. 11 atmosphere and the complexities of putting on an insanity defense will all make it difficult, finding an unbiased jury is still very possible, legal experts say. One key is crafting a solid written questionnaire, said Philip Anthony, CEO of the jury-and-trial consulting firm DecisionQuest. Anthony is not involved in the Haq case.

"Jurors are willing to be more candid [on paper] than they are in open court. They can reflect upon the answer, and it becomes very obvious whether they can serve or whether they'd be biased," Anthony said.

The issue isn't whether would-be jurors hold beliefs about the legal system, or even guilt in a particular case. What matters to the court is whether they are willing and able to set those feelings aside and judge the case on the facts and evidence presented at trial, and how the law applies to them.

"It's fine to have emotions," Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Don Raz told a woman who became upset in court Thursday as she recalled what she described as an "unprovoked attack" on women at the center.

One of the shortest rounds of questioning in the Haq case came Thursday, when a potential juror — a married, middle-aged woman — promptly told the court: "Anyone found guilty of murder should be executed. No waiting on death row wasting taxpayer money."

She had barely sat down before she was politely excused by Superior Court Judge Paris Kallas. For most of the selection process, it has been Kallas who decides whether to remove someone from the pool for cause, after one or both legal teams make a request. But next week, once the panel has been trimmed to about 30 prospective jurors, each side will be allowed to exercise six "peremptory challenges" — meaning they can remove someone from the dwindling pool without having to say why.

In the end, 12 citizens and two alternates will be left.

Generally, attorneys search for people with straightforward life experiences, said John Strait, a Seattle University associate professor of law. But opening a window to those experiences can be tricky.

"Most jurors, if they want to serve, are pretty slow to say that they are so biased they couldn't be fair. It's not an easy thing to say, and it also assumes a level of self-awareness they might not have," Strait said.

It requires an attorney to be "more subtle — you ask about life experiences that reveal more of what their inner thoughts are," Strait said.

And that still doesn't guarantee honesty, noted Anthony.

"People can get pressured when they stand up in open court and the judge barks at them, "You can be fair, right?' They might not be willing to say 'No, because I don't like Muslims.'

"Ferreting out bias is an art form, a complicated tapestry," he said.

Attorneys must also watch for someone shielding the truth in an overeagerness to serve.

"... Some jurors posture a Court-TV sense of 'juror as celebrity,' or a post-September 11, newfound sense of juror as citizen-patriot," wrote jury expert Alan J. Cohen in a 2002 law-journal article about using psychology to anticipate bias. Cohen has been retained by Haq's defense team during the jury selection process, though the motion for expert funds has been sealed and the King County Office of the Public Defender would not say Friday whether Cohen is being paid or, if so, how much.

The prosecution has not employed an expert jury consultant.

Aside from the publicity, Haq's case poses additional challenges because he has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyers must also try to ferret out any bias against the mentally ill or suspicions that the defense is a legal loophole being used to somehow set Haq free.

"The defense wants people who are going to be sympathetic to their client and who will hold the state to a high burden of proof," said Marchese, who tried aggravated-murder and death-penalty cases as a prosecutor and now does mostly civil defense. "Prosecutors want pro-state, law-abiding, anti-crime citizens."

A continuing concern for the defense has been the extensive media coverage the shootings received, and the likelihood that potential jurors know something about the case and have possibly formed opinions already.

"Given the breadth of negative coverage that has plagued Mr. Haq's case, the juror pool is certainly polluted," wrote defense attorneys John Carpenter and C. Wesley Richards in an earlier brief requesting additional time for jury selection.

But Anthony, whose company aided the family of Ronald Goldman in its successful wrongful-death civil lawsuit against O.J. Simpson in 1997, says that even in highly publicized incidents, people rarely remember details.

"Most people usually say things like, 'I don't turn on the TV, I don't read the newspaper, I could be fair,' " he said. "They want to hear the facts."

Natalie Singer: 206-464-2704 or nsinger@seattletimes.com