Opinion ID: 1795142
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Fairness of the Voir Dire Examination

Text: During the early stages of the voir dire examination of the jury, appellant's counsel addressed the following question to the court: We have general questions and then individual questions after the general questions? To this the court responded; That's normally the way we do it. Immediately prior thereto the court had asked general questions of the jury panel and whenever a venireman responded to one of those general questions, the court pursued the matter with additional specific questions. The prosecuting attorney proceeded to follow essentially the same procedure. When defense counsel undertook his questioning of the panel, he adopted the same pattern. When this procedure had been completed, and the discussion between the court and counsel turned to the matter of challenges, defense counsel discovered that the court and prosecuting attorney considered the voir dire examination completed. Defense counsel protested, stating that in his home county the customary procedure was to have general questioning of the jurymen as a whole, just as had just been completed in this case, but then to permit counsel to interrogate each venireman individually. Appellant's counsel stated that he had understood from his question to the court and the court's answer that this was the procedure to be followed in the present case. These protests by appellant's counsel were overruled and his request to continue with further examination of the veniremen individually was denied. That action by the trial court does not constitute grounds for reversal. The trial court has considerable discretion in the control of voir dire examination and the appellate court will interfere only when the record shows a manifest abuse of that discretion. State v. Scott, 515 S.W.2d 524 (Mo.1974); Brown v. Bryan, 419 S.W.2d 62 (Mo.1967); Olsten v. Susman, 391 S.W.2d 331 (Mo.1965). Nothing approaching an abuse of discretion appears here. First of all, the procedure employed for the voir dire examination in this case finds direct approval in State v. Richards, 467 S.W.2d 33 (Mo.1971). Furthermore, nothing which happened in the trial court gave any reason to hold that generally permissible procedure to have been erroneous or unfair in this case. The attorneys on both sides went into the voir dire examination with the benefit of questionnaires which had been filled out by each of the veniremen giving personal data. With that as the beginning point, extensive questioning took place in open court, taking up almost 100 pages of the transcript on appeal. Over and above the general questions put to the veniremen collectively, 44 out of a total of 60 veniremen were questioned individually by either the court or counsel; 21 of them were questioned individually by appellant's counsel himself. The curtailment of any further individual questioning was not the result of any purposeful misleading of appellant's counsel by either the court or the prosecuting attorney, but rather was attributable to defense counsel's own failure to be more specific in his inquiry. The curtailment was reasonable, within customary limits, and cannot be said to have resulted in any reversible prejudice.