Court Opinion

ID: 9735227
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:06:01.992696+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:56.182305
License: Public Domain

Boyle, J.
(concurring in the result). To the extent that the lead opinion could be read to require trial courts in high publicity cases to allow attorneys to: (1) submit questionnaires to potential jurors, (2) participate in voir dire, or (3) conduct sequestered voir dire, I respectfully disagree. Cf. Mallett, J., ante at 623-624. Likewise, I disagree with the Court of Appeals cumulative-error analysis suggesting that the collective decisions of the court — failing to conduct a sequestered voir dire and not allowing counsel to meaningfully participate in voir dire — deprived the defendant of a fair trial. Cf. 196 Mich App 576, 590; 494 NW2d 20 (1992).
Nevertheless, I join in Justice Mallett’s result for the sole reason that the record supports the conclusion that counsel asked the court to question venire members about what they had heard or *645remembered from pretrial publicity, and the court did not do so.
What a prospective juror knows and remembers about an incident is of great significance in exercising challenges. However, a request for content questions, meaning questions about the content of the publicity to which potential jurors have been exposed, creates an obvious dilemma for the trial court and defense counsel. Where potential jurors are not sequestered during voir dire, as all agree they need not be, these questions pose the risk that the revelation of some detail might either cause the entire process to be aborted, or else furnish the basis for appellate claims based on jury taint or ineffective assistance of counsel. A trial court can only avoid these dangers completely by conducting sequestered voir dire of each member of the venire who acknowledges exposure to publicity (in this case, all but two of them), which is not required as a matter of law, or, when individualized voir dire is denied, by confirming on the record that counsel does not desire content questions directed to the entire panel.
Because trial counsel runs the risk that asking such questions will reinforce specific details or negative impressions that other panel members gained from pretrial exposure, counsel may deliberately forgo asking content questions for sound strategic reasons. For example, defense counsel’s mid-voir dire request that the court refrain from asking potential jurors to state their opinions about the case was clearly a strategic decision designed to minimize the effect of panel members’ opinions on the rest of the venire. For that reason, the superficiality of the compound question that was prompted by this request cannot form the basis for error.
The record does not permit the same conclusion, *646however, with respect to questions regarding what the venire members remembered about pretrial publicity. I concur with Justice Mallett’s result because the extensive amount of pretrial publicity counseled special caution, and I cannot say with confidence that counsel elected to forgo content questions, which she asked for, but were not presented.