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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone, I'm Ann Emerson and this is criminally obsessed. How are they going to pick a jury for the new Alec Murdoch trial? I mean, everyone knows about the Murdoch murders, especially here in South Carolina, right? And let's not forget the last trial got tossed thanks to jury influencing. So the bar is really high. It's got to be the, one of the most famous cases. It's up there with O.J. simpson. It just is. Everybody knows who Alec Murdoch is and if they don't, if they have not made up their mind if they are going to be an impartial juror for you, do you believe that that is actually an advantage for the defense?
- [00:39]
B
I do because I don't think they have any evidence, any real evidence.
- [00:43]
A
They have to seat 12 jurors and we know from last time they had a pool of about 900 people. So how did they do it? These high profile cases are incredibly complex, are they not? I had to ask my new friend Susan Constantine what she thinks will be going on behind the scenes. Call her a juror whisperer. It's her job to know which way a person may lean and why.
- [01:08]
B
I want to hear the words that come out of their mouths. I want to know how they, they pause before they say something. I, when they're asked a specific question,
- [01:18]
A
can they do it? Can they find jurors who will keep their minds open to the facts before this jury gets seated, Susan says they will leave nothing to chance.
- [01:27]
B
I think that you're going to see a lot of social media mining. They're going to really do a lot of deep dive into that demographic area. Who lives there? You know, are they a family oriented area? Do they, are gun owners, are they hunters? Are they all this stuff?
- [01:42]
A
Be sure to like subscribe and turn on your notifications. I don't want you to miss any of the cases that you're obsessed with. Now let's get into it. How in the world are they going to find a jury? How are they going to pick a jury for round two of the, the Murdoch murder trial? What does that look like?
- [02:04]
B
Well, first of all, we already have a template of the last trial and the demographics of that trial. I think that they're talking about changing venue, which for Alex Murdoch is probably a great idea because it's so widely known especially it's very visceral in their own town. And you have to remember it's a small little town and you know, they've exhausted all of the, you know, summons in that area. So they've got to go Outside like they did with the Casey Anthony trial and they went to Pinellas county because, oh my God, they so much hated her in Orlando. So I think going outside of there, it's not so much that they're looking for a juror that doesn't know. Right. And I think that's really important. We don't want jurors that live under a rock. It is really difficult to find a juror that has not already formed an opinion. So we have to really drill down. And since I'm not sure whether they're putting the death penalty on the table or not, because that's a separate stage in the jury selection, which is death qualification. But just for the initial jury, they want to know what they do know, what kind of news stories about what are they watch the local news, they're going to talk to them about tree pretrial publicity. They're going to talk to them about hardship. You know, so what we do is we start to chill down, chisel away, you know, I don't know how many they're going to summon at, on each day. You know, they'll go through, let's say they summon, you know, a thousand people and they are going through 50 to 100 of them or they might go through 20. Whatever their process, everybody does it different. And then it could, let's say juror one through 20 comes in or juror one through 50 comes in and they do the opening and they talk about the case and everything else. And then that's when we start to look for, you know, challenges for, for cause like they might have hardship or they can't, they're a single parent mom or they've already heard of the case before, they've already formed an opinion. All those they dismissed, then you got the leftovers, right? So they might not put aside, they grab in another bunch of. They go through the same process, right. So and, and then once they go through that process, then the ones that are left over, that's when they start to really get into void dire, which is in the seeking the truth. We're trying to find more about people. So I'm looking at different values, belief systems, you know, different demographics and belief systems of prosecution jurors versus defense jurors. They're totally different. I think that you're going to see a lot of social media minded, they're going to really do a lot of deep dive into that demographic area, who lives there, what their occupations are, level of incomes, you know, are they a family oriented area? Do they are gun owners Are they hunters? Are they. All this stuff is going to be collected and this is all probably been do been going on ever since the other, other conviction.
- [05:02]
A
Do you think both sides are going to have a jury consultants? Do you feel like they're both going to have.
- [05:07]
B
I think they're either they don't have a jury consultant. They're going to have already someone they've already consulted with. So a lot of times I know what they want. Yeah. And so like in for me and my team, what we'll do is that we have a case that's, you know, we feel like needs to have like a mock trial or focus group which is, this is way too big to be able to do that because we don't want to use those jurors on that area to remove from the pool that we, we need to pull from. I go through all of the statements, I go through a past testimony of let's say Murdoch and then I can detect where in there is deception based on statement analysis. So then I know exactly where the attorney needs to probe because that's where, that's where the, the disuseption lies in omitting information, skipping over information. And then we'll create questions around that.
- [06:01]
A
What is the defense looking for in a, in a ideal juror For a second trial.
- [06:08]
B
Yeah, for the second trial. And I want you to understand there's things that you, that people misunderstand is that it's not just based on their age demographics, whether the male or female, you know, what they do for a living. I want to hear the words that come out of their mouth. I want to know how they, they pause before they say something. I when they're asked a specific question. They may have all the right demographic factors which is what I call pro defense which is are those that are going to be more willing to listen to second opinion, like formed an opinion yet I'm less rigid. It could but you know when we say okay wait a minute, it might be somebody that's working at a grocery store. Right. Someone that may have been misunderstood before. Right. That may have accused someone of being accused of something. But they weren't so we, we weren't. Those types of people also can hold very strong belief systems and that's why the o the more deeper open ended questions are really important. On the other side we're going to flip now. We're going to the state. Those are more of those law abiding citizens. Right.
- [07:19]
A
For the prosecution.
- [07:21]
B
Prosecution. Now those are the ones that are saying listen, I may be a gun owner. But there's also a way you handle. There's safety involved. You know, you're. You're a smart person when you're dealing with guns or safety. We're over here. This other guy may not feel this way on the other side. So you're. There's always this flipping back and forth. So I actually made some, some notes here. So the state is going to be looking for more of those highly logical, more analytical people that can look at the evidence. They're not as emotional.
- [07:52]
A
Mm.
- [07:52]
B
So they're not going to get so much the emotion where maybe over here they might go, oh, I just really, you know, I, I'm so emotionally affected by it. You know, they almost creating emotional flooding. Like they're, like the emotion is just too much. Almost, almost flood flooding that they can't make the decision. Right. Or I mean, may not be able to render a bit verdict of, of guilty because he would be away forever and ever and ever. These guys over here. Oh, heck no. You know, you jaywalked, you're going to jail. I mean, those are those kind of people. So when you, you know, when you're in the, in trial and are in the jury selection, that's. There's a lot that you need to unpack. And I watch for something that most people don't do, and I look for a rapid blinking, like they're asked a question and they go, well, yes, I can. I can be fair and partial. I'm going to go, no, I can't. I don't care what side it is. That's cognitive load. So if they naturally blink in a normal rate and then you ask them a probative question where they're trying to deviate from the truth, which is you might be looking for a stealth juror on this case. Right. Because they variety. You know, we looked at the clerk the last time, right. We. Somebody might be wanting to write a book. So cognitive load is a really in piece because it's physiological and they have no control. They can control the words that come out of their mouth. They can say whatever they want. And the question is not can you be a fair and impartial juror? Will you? And when they're asked that question, instead of saying, can you like the first question, will you impartial jerk. And of course, if they're going, yeah, but maybe we're looking at, yeah, I can be a fair impartial juror. I'm already seeing inconsistencies, right? No. When you're saying yes, then the next Follow up question would be, will you be a fair partial juror if you're selected beyond this jury? Right. Maybe it might be.
- [09:54]
A
It's a hard one, right? It's hard if you're lying about that, that's a hard one to do.
- [09:59]
B
That's harder to cover. Because then there's like, well, yeah, I think I can. Well, if you think you can, they're going to come right back saying, well, can, can you and will you or do you have to think about it? So there's that pause. Think about when somebody's asked a question, that's really important. Is there a pause, hesitation. Because in the end of the day, they want a fair juror jury on both sides, but it's never foolproof. And so I want to let you know that if even being a trial consultant, it's not perfected science, it just isn't because people are complicated. And as the, as the evidence unfolds, it's going to trigger a lot of thinking, a lot of feelings, emotions, anger, frustration, fatigue. A lot of fatigue. You know, there's fatigue. Their minds can only grasp so much. And then I've even seen where some jurors are so overwhelmed, they don't take any notes. They wait to get that behind this, behind in the deliberations and they start to rely on what other people say they've written down. So I like to figure out who is, who is, I'm more interested who is going to be my four person, who do I want as my four person? Because they're going to be the strongest one in the pack.
- [11:10]
A
I wanted to ask you, as far as the conviction reversal that's, that's occurred in this case, what does it tell you about the jury experience in such high profile cases? Like if you know when you have a conviction reversal like this did and they, and they came to a conclusion within three hours. Yet we now know what was going on behind the scenes to some degree. These high profile cases are incredibly complex, are they not?
- [11:48]
B
Oh my gosh, this is like one of the most highly complex. I was in London going in the grocery store, going down one of the aisles and I had two, hey, you know, yeah, these two British talking about Alex Murdoch trial. That's how widespread this thing is. And I'm sitting there going, oh my God, they have no idea. I'm a trial consultant. I've been analyzing all this stuff. So it is wide and it's deep. It's worldwide, especially with the World Wide Web. Right. Everybody knows about, rigged about it. So when, when you're dealing with another trial. You're going to have all of our true crimers, right? We're all like, we're all into this. We love to figure out the puzzle. Like I see behind you, you've got all the crime scene little. We're always trying to link things together. We're always just trying to figure out why people do what they do. Right. So in a high profile trial, now you've got a retrial. I think that what's going to happen is they're going to work really hard on trying to subdue a lot of the pretrial publicity. I think, I don't know what they have planned, but I think that that's going to be a major issue because if they change venue, what's going to happen? Everybody's going to go there. Like when I was at the Casey Anthony trial, I sat through the whole thing, okay. The whole six weeks that it went on. Every day I was in the courtroom and the line of people walking through it was like you would think we were somewhere on the Eddies. Seriously, with all the snapshots and pictures and it's like either watching a real life true crime story in action, you know, watching it on TV and actually being there, like, you know, you and I have been, it's a, it's a whole different feel, all different thing. So this time around, when we look at it, they're going to learn from their mistakes. They're going to test different strategies and then when they test the strategies, they're going to figure out which ones will work and which ones won't. So they'll be doing a lot of analysis. So that goes into jury research. This is not just walk into the courtroom, pick a jury and you're in there. You know, there's a lot of thought that goes behind it. But what they do have is, is they have history, history of this case, they have history of all of the posts. Do you know that they use all those social media post and that's how they strategize their case from day to day. So in other words, they were feeding social media these little plugs about Casey Anthony parts of trial. What do they see? And they're watching to see what people are responding to. And especially with AI, you literally can gather all that data, put it into AI and it'll start to create, you know, what would your strategy be? What would you do? How do you, how do you overcome that?
- [14:46]
A
Is it realistic to think that people that are picked on this jury aren't going to be looking at their cell phones and, and, and, or talking to their loved ones.
- [14:56]
B
I think that it is naive to think that, you know, I don't know very many, very many people when they're dealing with something so horrific, so high profile that couldn't come on going, I heard it right husband to say what's going on? And you know, she'll say, I can't say. You know, I mean if you. Let's get real here. Yeah, okay. I, I have a hard time believing that they're going to contain that for an entire month and never breathe one word of it or pick up their phone and all of a sudden maybe, and maybe unintentionally pops up.
- [15:35]
A
I mean, just scrolling like, can you even imagine like one month of you're not going to be hooked into all that? Who was the person that they picked to do that? Like, how do you find somebody in this modern age?
- [15:51]
B
It's not. And then. Well, they could be looking at somebody else's cell phone. Right. I gotta tell you something is that if there's a connection, they're gonna, they're gonna do an examination of every juror and their practices. And that's the other thing is they're going to be mining everything, all their social media. Are they on Facebook, are they on Twitter, are they on. What are these, what are they doing? Or are they on somebody else's? You know, social media mining is not as hard as, as it used to be. Right. So it's hard, it's easier to get caught.
- [16:23]
A
I was just about to ask you about a self.
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B
Sure.
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A
Like somebody that's kind of gone in saying they're going to be open and minded and you know, I can, I can look at all this new evidence and be okay. But they're not.
- [16:36]
B
No. There are stealth jurors and I always say be careful of the ones that never say anything that go under the radar during jury select, during void dire or they over sell. I don't have a problem. I've got. Somebody's going to watch my kids. But they've got four, right? Yeah, I got four kids. Yes, I know. I'm a single parent. But that's okay. My mom's going to watch the kids and that over anxiousness. Right. I want to do my civic duty and they start to do a real sell job. And the other ones, when I think about the movie, Runaway Jury is a perfect example. Right. The guy goes under undercover and. Right. So he's. You ever seen the movie before Runaway Jury?
- [17:16]
A
Now I haven't seen it, but now I've got to watch it.
- [17:18]
B
You got to watch. It's perfect. Talking about trial consulting, jury consulting, high profile case and a stealth juror who wants to get in. Once they're in, then he's now going to sway the jury.
- [17:28]
A
Yeah.
- [17:29]
B
So now I don't think that there's going to be someone in there that would sway them for any other purpose other than the fact that they could be someone that could be the holdout. Right. Someone that's going to say, ah, yeah, I've already formed opinion. I don't care what you all think, but I'm not changing my verdict. And then you got a retrial, you got a hung jury, you got a hung trial.
- [17:49]
A
Yeah, hung jury. One thing I do want to ask about, because this was a brutal, brutal double murder, you know, and we are asking these jurors to go back and watch or look at pictures of a young boy and the mom being gunned down. These are not easy images. I know. You know, unless you're a doctor or someone who's had been exposed over and over to images like that, we are now asking, you know, all together, more than a dozen people to have to look at this.
- [18:26]
B
Yeah.
- [18:26]
A
How does it affect them long term? Because I, I can't imagine.
- [18:31]
B
Well, it depends on whether you tend to be very emotional. Right. This has been just devastating. They do suffer from ptsd. I mean, your crime con. When I was. If you went in, listen to two jurors that served on high profile cases. One, of course, was Daybell. Remember that one? And.
- [18:53]
A
Yeah.
- [18:54]
B
Horrible. And the other lady, who I can't remember what trial she was on, she was more analytical. She was able to compartmentalize her feelings. The other one was a wreck. She broke down, she cried. In fact, she even said, I, I got goosebumps thinking about this. And she said, you know, Lori Daybell, I had to look at the pictures. I'm looking at JJ and her in a sister in that way, she says, and she wouldn't look. And she said, if I have to look at it, so do you. I mean, I got goosebumps literally down here because it was so visceral and so emotional that she says, I have, I'm going through counseling. I mean, it's been really, really hard. It's been devastating. She's. I've had, I've had nightmares. Ready to learn nightmares about it. I mean, you can't unsee those things. There truly is evil in this world, as most people want to say. Well, they've lost emotional control or, you know, they try to blame it all and all these other things. Yeah, I think they've opened the portal to something somewhere. And with him, Murdoch, it was greed, power, dominance, control, coercion, all of that. But that all came from where he was being fulfilled. So, you know, feeding is narcissism, right. So there's always a root. But that root starts to grow branches, right? And that branches starts to really grow bigger, bigger, bigger and it overtakes. So there, that's where that they become like infiltrated of evil thoughts because they have manifested them by visualizing them carrying them out, the planning, all of that to where they go. When somebody murders somebody, especially like this, they have already reached. There's three things you look for. Anger, contempt and disgust. Disgust is the strongest emotion. Angry because maybe the son was the car. That could have something to do with it. Anger and dis. And then you get to disgust, right? Contempt. I'm so ticked off that they're. They're suing me. How dare they sue me, I'm an attorney. Disgust, right. Like, you know, there's that. When you get that it's called the Andacondi triad. When you reach that level of that cocktail, oh, it is like Mount St. Helens erupting. It is the most dangerous cocktail. So when you get to that place, they are only thinking about this is a disease. My job is to eliminate it. They form these opinions, they have anger, disgust, anger, contempt with the system. Disgust. I'm going to eliminate. My job now is to eliminate. That's when they now calculate plan to execute. Because now it is now not emotional. It's in the process of execution. So they've able to cube themselves out into carrying it out.
- [21:51]
A
That's fits a pattern. Doesn't really does. You know, I think that's what. What they were trying to, you know, tell the jury. The prosecution called it the family annihilator. You know, all the things that we're discussing right now. Absolutely. This new jury is going to have to keep their open mind.
- [22:11]
B
You're 100% correct. All we need for the defense, or all he needs, because I'm nothing, not for the defense, is one person. They just need to. They just need to create reasonable doubt. That's all they have to do. One person. One person. Just one.
- [22:27]
A
Drop a comment below. I want to hear what you're thinking about this case, especially about the jury. How are they going to find 12 jurors that can keep an open mind? How hard is it going to be? Let me know what you think. And be sure to like and subscribe. And subscribe. And turn on your notifications because you know I'm going to be updating Murdoch coverage.