He was in his late thirties or early forties, intelligent and well-spoken.

He answered every question he was asked in a measured, conscientious manner and promised he would remain just as thoughtful if picked for the panel charged with returning verdicts in the federal death penalty trial surrounding the 2006 slayings of a family of four on Florida’s Turnpike.

As U.S. District Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley discussed the potential juror with attorneys, though, their conversation wasn’t focused on the man’s views on the death penalty.

The potential juror, an executive at Wachovia, had told them that if he missed two or three months from work in the midst of his bank’s merger with Wells Fargo, he couldn’t be sure he’d have a job when he returned.

“I think this is a situation where he’ll be here at a crucial time, a time of uncertainty in his company, where frankly, they don’t know what will happen,” Hurley said, adding that he worried the man would not be able to focus on the trial knowing his job was in jeopardy.

So the juror was dismissed from service.

Jury consultants and experts say cases like his have always been present in the justice system, but the economic crisis has made them much more prevalent.

“People get caught in a hard spot because they want to do their civic duty, but they also have that need to put food on the table,” said Joe Guastaferro, an Atlanta-based jury consultant who has worked several high-profile cases in South Florida.

During the same day of interviews in the turnpike case, Hurley also dismissed a Pompano Beach business owner who said she needed to be at the helm for the next two months to execute another round of layoffs she’s been forced to make.

“How do you make someone like that serve?” asked Miami-based jury consultant Sandy Marks.

Marks and others say that in cases like these, attorneys at times do not raise objections to having those jurors dismissed, choosing instead to pick their battles over other potential panelists.

Richard Waites, chief trial psychologist for The Advocates, a Texas based trial consulting firm with offices in West Palm Beach, said he has seen many courts calling in larger jury pools for trial anticipating that more potential jurors will be excused for financial reasons.

In the turnpike slayings case, the court sent out more than 2,000 questionnaires and came up with a pool of 300 to go through rounds of questioning.

Of the 30 people interviewed on the first day of jury selection, three had lost their jobs within the past six months. Two lost work in the week before the selection process began.

Several others said that though their companies would pay for their jury service, they would lose out on other income they desperately needed.

On the fourth day of interviews, a potential juror had been a banker for 28 years but had lost his job in August and had since been working as a substitute teacher.

When asked whether he could serve, he joked that the standard jury pay would not be that much less than what he currently earned.

On Thursday, Hurley and the attorneys were presented with a case of a supervisor at a medical supply company who said he and his team would be spending the next few months absorbing the work of another group of people who had been laid off.

Hurley dismissed the potential juror without objection from either side.

“We all look at what’s going on in the economy, and we see how it’s all affecting us personally,” Marks said. “But when you hear about things like this, you realize it is affecting everything around us, even our jury system.”

Tags: court, employment, judge daniel t.k. hurley, jurors, jury

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