Transcription:
Peter Pentony:
There’s a little pocket around the university that’s pretty much a democratic stronghold, but the rest of the County is pretty conservative. And under certain circumstances, I’d be really worried about that particularly during the pandemic. In this case, I wanted more conservative jurors. I thought that with my client being a former Marine, with the defendant being a Spanish speaking immigrant, I felt like that was going to be favorable to us.
Brendan Lupetin:
In addition to that, were there any traits or qualities of jurors that you were looking for in the selection process?
Peter Pentony:
You know, there are certain things that would be more helpful. You want people who are in decision-making roles with their companies, because we had the negligent entrustment claim in our case. It wasn’t going to be a bad thing for us if we had some folks with spinal problems, not that I wanted anybody to have that, but have someone with that context and life experience to bring to bear in our case where the extent of his limitations because of the spinal injury was in question. And as it turned out, we had some really good witnesses during voir dire. You hope that those magical moments when someone stands up in voir dire and talks about their surgery or their continuing problems. We had a few of those happen during voir dire, which made me happy that we, that our judge had been able to find a way to get the whole panel there at one time.
