The North Carolina jury selection policies govern a process used to find a panel of jurors who will be fair and impartial to both sides during a trial. North Carolina jury selection policies are documented in the North Carolina General Statutes § 9-1 through 9-9. These policies were originally passed in 1967, and they were revised in 2011. Jury selection is the procedure whereby persons from the community are called to court, questioned by the litigants as to their qualifications to serve as a juror and then either selected or rejected to serve as a juror.
Voir dire
North Carolina selects jurors through the use of voir dire, which permits involved parties to ask questions of potential jurors for the purpose of determining whether or not these jurors should serve on the case. Voir dire has aims to get potential jurors speaking about themselves and to elicit truthful and complete answers from potential jurors.
Process according to North Carolina General Statutes
The jury commission
To begin the process, North Carolina General Statute § 9-1 requires that (no later than July 1, 1967), each county shall appoint a jury commission of three members. One member of the commission shall be appointed by the senior regular resident superior court judge, one member by the clerk of superior court, and one member by the board of county commissioners. These members serve for a term or two years, and appointees may be reappointed to successive terms. The three-member committee chooses jurors from a master list that they compile using the policies that are given in G.S. § 9-1 through 9-9.,
The master jury list
During every odd-numbered year, the jury commission is charged with the duty of preparing a master list of prospective jurors who are qualified to serve beginning on January 1 of the next year. The master list must be created from a record of all the registered voters and persons with drivers license records. The jury commission may also use names from other lists as long as those lists are deemed reliable by that commission. Once this list is created, the commission must merge the names from each source used and randomly select the desired number of names for the master jury list. This process may be carried out using electronic data processing equipment in the counties that have the necessary equipment to do so. The jury commission shall continue to make decisions as to mental or physical competency of prospective jurors. In order to ensure random selection of names from the master list, the list is to be sorted into random order before the first panel is drawn, and after the first panel, names may be selected sequentially from the randomized list without having to be further randomized.
The process for preparing the master jury list must be recorded and approved by the commission, and these documents must be made available to the public for inspection in the office of the clerk of court. After the master jury list is prepared, the name of each qualified person selected for the list shall be recorded and alphabetically arranged. The office of the clerk of court is charged with maintaining the alphabetized list along with a statement of the sources used and procedures followed in preparing the list. The alphabetized list must be kept under lock and key, but it shall be made available for public inspection during regular office hours. The clerk of court may elect to store an electronic copy of the alphabetized list for the county. However, public access to juror information shall be limited to the alphabetized list of the names with no access to the addresses, which are confidential and not subject to discloser without an order of the court.