Fair Selection of Jury Panels from Jury Pools

摘要

A standard problems of courts at all levels is the selection of a panel ofpotential jurors from a jury pool, which is a list of people who are eligible to serve as jurors. By some means beyond the scope of this report, we suppose that the pool of eligible jurors has been identified in a court jurisdiction. Let M be the number of people in the pool. In a large jurisdiction, M could be as large as a few million. Frequently, some of the pool members must be chosen as potential jurors, to form a jury panel. Let N be the number to be chosen, where N is less (and usually much less) than M. The problem is to select N people out of the M possible people in a fair way. One definition (FI) of 'fair' is that each of the M people has an equal chance to be selected for any jury pool. A much more rigorous definition (F2) is that each of the possible combinations of N people has an equal chance to be selected as the entire jury pool.