CHARLESTON – Kanawha Circuit Judge Tod Kaufman recently was a guest speaker at Trinity College in Dublin, where he spoke about trial judges in America.
Kaufman also discussed Americans constitutional right to jury trials and how trial judges are "gate keepers of this important right in our Bill of Rights."
Kaufman said America handles jury trials differently than Britain and Ireland.
"For instance, we have a much more thorough voir dire process to see that two fundamental 14th Amendment rights are protected in every jury trial, those being the right to serve on a jury and the right to have a jury of peers be the fact finders in your case," Kaufman said.
Kaufman said how Americans strive in the voir dire process to rid the jury panel of citizens who may be conflicted out of a particular case, yet protect eligible jurors' rights to serve by seeing that they cannot be removed for discriminatory reasons is a distinguishing characteristic of the American jury system.
"The British process is a more random selection process with little or no questioning of jurors for bias before hand," Kaufman said. "I believe our system is better, but I have an American judge's bias on this."
Kaufman's lecture was titled "What Trial Judges in America Really Do."
