The Bonds court's analysis

Because the Supreme Court has not resolved the tension between confidential juror questionnaires and open access to jury selection, lower courts are left to decide how to address the issue. A federal court’s approach in the recent trial proceedings in the case of United States v. Barry Bonds provides one possible framework. The approach follows the example of earlier state court decisions in California.

Local and national press provided daily, and, in some instances, hourly and immediate, updates at the former Major League Baseball slugger’s high-profile trial this spring on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. Among the information the press reported were details about the jurors who ultimately found the former San Francisco Giant and home run king guilty of one count of obstruction of justice.

As Bonds’ anticipated trial began, the media provided the public with a close-up analysis of the jurors selected, and those not selected. For example, The New York Times reported that a man who “identified” with Bonds and supported the Giants was not selected for the jury, while a woman who said that she had heard that Bonds “might have lied to Congress or a judge about steroid use” was seated. A blog post for the San Jose Mercury News reported that a potential juror who said he was a “huge S.F. Giants Fan” and viewed the perjury case as “a waste of government time” was not seated.

One reason the public received expanded information about the jurors and potential jurors who heard Bonds’ case was that the trial court judge agreed to release most of the information included on the juror questionnaires. Specifically, the court decided that the juror questionnaires would be made public at the time of juror selection, with the exception that the names of the jurors would be withheld until the end of the trial.

The court’s decision to release the questionnaires was a reversal of its earlier ruling. When the trial was previously set to begin in 2009, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco initially ordered all juror questionnaires to be sealed from the public. A media coalition asked the judge to reconsider that ruling. The court did not rule on that request because the trial was postponed for unrelated reasons.

When the trial was rescheduled for this spring, Illston revisited the juror questionnaire issue. Her analysis essentially turned on two key questions: First, should juror questionnaires be considered presumptively public documents? And second, if questionnaires are presumptively public, are there any overriding reasons for keeping them private in a particular case?