Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, good morning. I want to welcome you to the United States District Court for / the Northern District of Texas. I am the judge in this case. You have been brought here to act as / the jury in the matter that is before us at this time. The case that we will be working on / is a criminal case.

We will need to select twelve of you to sit on the jury. In order to / be able to select twelve good men and women to sit on the jury, we need to have all of / you here and present. That is why all of you are here at this time. We will not select all / of you, but we need all of you to be here during the selection of the jury.

Ladies and gentlemen / of the jury, we will proceed with the selection of the jury or what we call “voir dire” in a / minute or two. What will happen at that time is that we will fill up the jury box with twelve / of you.

We have set up a very nice system that we use in order to select the first twelve / people who will enter the jury box. This is the way that we do it. The clerk will call out / a name. At that time, that person will walk forward and take the first seat in the jury box. Then / the clerk will call out another name. At that time, that person will come forward and take the second seat / in the jury box.

The first seat is the one in the front row all the way to the left. / That is where the first person will sit. The second seat is right next to that. The third one is / right next to that. After we fill up the front row with the first six people on the jury, then / we will begin to fill up the back row in the exact same manner.

Once, we have twelve people in / the jury box, the lawyer for the defendant and the lawyer for the plaintiff will come forward and ask questions / of each and every one of you. They want to know whether or not you are the type of a / person that they want to have on a jury. This is not as easy as you may think. The lawyer / for the plaintiff will want to have a person who will decide the case in a fair way for the / State of Texas. The lawyer for the defendant will want to have a person who will decide the case in / a fair way for his client, the defendant in this case.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is very / common that one lawyer will like a certain person, but the other lawyer will not like that same person. It / is part of their job to find a jury that they feel will be able to decide the case in / a fair manner for the side that they represent in the case.

The lawyer for the plaintiff is the Assistant / District Attorney. The plaintiff is the State of Texas, and the Assistant District Attorney is paid to represent the State / of Texas at trial. There will be many times during the trial when I refer to the State instead of / the plaintiff. When I do that, you can be sure that I mean the State of Texas and the Assistant / District Attorney.

Now, as to the defendant and the attorney for the defendant, that is another matter. The defendant has his / own lawyer. In this case, he is a private attorney. I will often refer to the lawyer for the defendant / as the Defense.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the trial in this case might last for only one day. / It may have to continue over until tomorrow, but there is a good chance that we will be done / by the close of business. You will have an hour to eat at twelve o’clock, and we will give you / a break during the morning, and there will be another break in the afternoon.

I want to caution you that / you should not discuss this case with anyone while you are on a break. You may not even talk to / each other about this case at any time while you are on a break. There is only one place that / you may talk about this case, and that is in the jury room. At that time, it will be your / duty to talk about every fact in evidence and come to a fair and just decision in this case.

Ladies / and gentlemen of the jury, when you are on a break, you may see the attorney for the defendant or / the Assistant District Attorney in the hall. They will not speak to you. They are not being rude. They know / that they should not talk to you because there is a chance that somebody will say something about the case. / They know that that would be a very bad thing. So, do not feel that they do not like you. / They do not talk to you because they want to follow the rules of law that I, as the judge / in this case, demand that they follow.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if it is necessary that this case / continue on beyond today, you will be able to go home at the end of the day. Our usual time / to end the court is at 4:30. If we are not done by that time, we will send you / home.

When you are at home, it will be natural that your husband or wife will want you to tell / them all about the case. You are not to do so. In the same way that you do not talk / to the defense attorney or the Assistant District Attorney, you are not to talk about this case with your husband / or your wife or with any member of your family. In fact, you must not talk about this case with / anyone at all except for the members of the jury, and you can only talk about this case with the / members of the jury when you are in the jury room.

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