"Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are"
About this Quote
Wambaugh’s line doesn’t just demystify jury selection; it drags it out from behind the civic pageantry and drops it under harsh fluorescent light. Calling it “strictly an emotional process” is a deliberate provocation against the legal system’s favorite self-myth: that verdicts are the product of calm, rational weighing of facts. His point isn’t that jurors are stupid. It’s that everyone in the room understands persuasion isn’t primarily a spreadsheet exercise. It’s trust, fear, disgust, sympathy, and the subtle chemistry of who feels “like us.”
The subtext is nastier: voir dire is marketed as a search for fairness, but it functions like casting. Attorneys aren’t simply screening for bias; they’re assembling a narrative audience. “They’re looking for people they can manipulate” flips the usual language of “strategy” into something closer to predation, and the bluntness matters. Wambaugh was a cop-turned-novelist steeped in institutional realities, and his fiction and reportage tend to treat official rituals as performances with real casualties. Here, manipulation isn’t an aberration; it’s the operating system.
That clipped ending - “Both sides are” - lands like an unfinished confession. He doesn’t need to finish it because the cynicism is evenly distributed. Prosecution and defense, supposedly opposites in a morality play, converge as competing storytellers shopping for the same commodity: a persuadable human being. The discomfort is the point. If justice depends on who can better read a room, the trial starts to look less like truth-seeking and more like high-stakes emotional marketing.
The subtext is nastier: voir dire is marketed as a search for fairness, but it functions like casting. Attorneys aren’t simply screening for bias; they’re assembling a narrative audience. “They’re looking for people they can manipulate” flips the usual language of “strategy” into something closer to predation, and the bluntness matters. Wambaugh was a cop-turned-novelist steeped in institutional realities, and his fiction and reportage tend to treat official rituals as performances with real casualties. Here, manipulation isn’t an aberration; it’s the operating system.
That clipped ending - “Both sides are” - lands like an unfinished confession. He doesn’t need to finish it because the cynicism is evenly distributed. Prosecution and defense, supposedly opposites in a morality play, converge as competing storytellers shopping for the same commodity: a persuadable human being. The discomfort is the point. If justice depends on who can better read a room, the trial starts to look less like truth-seeking and more like high-stakes emotional marketing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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