How to Select Jurors for the Prosecution S Side

Costand v. Cosby The case against Bill Cosby has been brought on behalf of Andrea Costand who has accused Cosby of molesting her in 2004 by using drugs to induce her to have sex with him. Cosby, for his part, has denied the allegations of rape, saying that the sexual intercourse was consensual and that he told Costand what he was giving her and she accepted (Conti, 2015).

If I were prosecuting Bill Cosby, I would want a younger jury, whose conception of the comedian is informed more by the stories purported by modern media than the image of Cosby from his days of television success as good, family man on The Cosby Show back in the 1980s.

So in terms of age, I would want younger jurors (even though jurors are supposed to be impartial and have no knowledge of the defendant, in this case that is likely to be very difficult to find, so we make certain assumptions: however, with social media being popular among the young, it is more than possible that a young juror will not pass the muster of the defense; older persons may have less intelligence of the defendant.

In this case, age will not be the primary focus when selecting jurors, as far as the prosecution is concerned). Instead, the prosecution will focus on race and gender. Because Andrea Constand, the accuser, has identified as being a lesbian, it may be in the benefit of the prosecution to have more females on the jury than males, and bi-sexual females if at all possible.

(This will not be something that the prosecution will be able to screen for, but through some creative questioning and reasonable deduction, it might be possible to make an educated guess). Regardless, it would be likely that females and lesbians and/or bisexuals would be more sympathetic to Constand in this case and thus more likely to side with the prosecution. As far as race goes, I would lean towards obtaining as many white jurors as possible.

The key here is to have as little sympathetic similarities between the jury and the defendant as possible. Thus, having more women on the jury than men would lean the jury in the prosecution's favor, and having more white than blacks on the jury would also theoretically lean the jury in the favor of the prosecution. Ethnically speaking, the same maxim follows here as it does for race.

Christian jurors would be ideal, but really any religion that has clearly defined dogmas and/or teachings about sex outside of marriage being wrong or sinful would be beneficial to the side of the prosecution. Education would be a toss-up. Some educated persons will naturally tend to try to reason out a defense for the accused while others will naturally try to reason out the story from the side of the accuser.

Uneducated people will typically do the same, so instead of using education as a guide, it might be better to use class. Class is something that can be identified through rigorous questioning and observation of the jurors. Jurors who show a degree of class would likely be more beneficial to the prosecution, while lower class jurors might be more likely to.