Jury Selection Class Created at OLLI Members' Request

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Melissa McMath Hatfield

A jury selection class offered at the University of Arkansas Osher Lifelong Learning Institute taught students the facts behind how jurors are chosen and, more importantly, why they are not.

Melissa McMath Hatfield, owner of McMath Trial Consultants, gave a two-hour class on April 30 that answered the frequently asked question of "why didn't I get picked?"

"We talked about jury selection and how it works," said Hatfield. "It's not actually a selection; it's a de-selection and we talked about why that is."

OLLI offers a number of classes throughout the year that focus on teaching older generations different skills or hobbies. The program provides high quality, affordable educational, cultural and engagement opportunities for mature adults, according to the OLLI website. Registration may be done online.

The purpose of the jury selection class was to give the students some insight as to why they might not have been chosen to be on the actual jury after being summoned for duty.

This is the first time a class like this has been taught at OLLI, and it was created because of great demand from OLLI members. A local book club was reading John Grisham's Runaway Jury and asked Hatfield to come and speak at a meeting. Some OLLI members were at the meeting to hear her speak and decided she would be a great fit for OLLI.

McMath made the class relevant for the students by basing it off Runaway Jury and using questions that were brought up during the two hours.

"It was an informal interactive approach," said Hatfield. "We had a small PowerPoint, to just describe the basics of what we were going to do, and then we had a handout of what a jury list would look like and a handout of different titles of cases I have worked on and they were to choose a title for us to discuss."

To get a better sense of what lawyers go through to pick the perfect jury, the students chose one prior case of Hatfield's and created their own jury profile.

The class was beneficial for the students, but also the instructor. Hatfield has taught jury selection before, but only to lawyers and trial consultants, never to a non-professional group.

"I had to look at it from a non-legal perspective," said Hatfield. "I had to rethink jury selection from a layman's term."