Concept
Challenges for Cause
Selection and composition of juries
Challenges for Cause
Voir dire produces answers, and a challenge for cause is how a party turns an answer into a removal. The party asks the judge to excuse one prospective juror for a stated reason, and the judge must rule on the request, excluding the juror if cause is found.1 Neither side faces a limit on how many jurors it may challenge this way.2 The requirement of a reason is what separates the challenge for cause from the peremptory challenge, taken up in the next section.
Two grounds anchor the challenge. The first is connection: a juror related to a party by blood or marriage, or tied to a party in business as creditor, debtor, employer, or employee, should be excluded for cause.3 The second is prejudice: a juror who is prejudiced on one or another issue, or against one or another party, is excluded the same way.4 Voir dire exists largely to expose both. Its questions are designed to discover whether a juror would be biased or has connections with a party or a prospective witness, and a juror shown through those questions to be biased or connected to the case must be dismissed on a party's motion.5 The word that matters is shown. A connection is a fact that can be established, and prejudice must surface before the judge can act on it.
A third basis for exclusion is statutory and objective. The Jury Selection and Service Act requires selection at random from a fair cross-section of the community, uses voter lists as the source of jurors, and abolished the "key man" system by setting objective criteria for disqualifications, exemptions, excuses, and exclusions; its statutory qualifications are deemed exhaustive.6 Those criteria turn on whether a person meets the statute's terms, not on a judgment about partiality, which is the judgment that fills most of voir dire. Systematic exclusion of racial, ethnic, or gender groups from the panel is a different problem again. It is a fair cross-section defect in the panel itself, the subject of the earlier discussion of the array, and a challenge for cause removes only one person at a time.7
The dispatcher's job is an employment tie to a party, the kind of connection that calls for exclusion, and the judge can verify it. The second juror presents only a general attitude, and her credible assurance leaves no bias shown. If she leans against the defendant at all, the lean is the kind of doubt that only a peremptory challenge can reach, as the next discussion explains.
Because no numerical limit applies, the judge's ruling is what controls the use of challenges for cause, and the judge's influence reaches further than the rulings themselves. As the Supreme Court noted in Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., the trial judge exercises substantial control over voir dire in the federal system. The judge determines the range of information that may be discovered about a prospective juror, and so affects both challenges for cause and peremptory challenges. The judge also oversees the exclusion of jurors for cause, and in this way determines which jurors remain eligible for the exercise of peremptory strikes.8
The contrast with the peremptory challenge shows why a party presses for cause first. In Swain v. Alabama, the Court explained that challenges for cause permit rejection of jurors "on a narrowly specified, provable and legally cognizable basis of partiality," while the peremptory permits rejection "for a real or imagined partiality that is less easily designated or demonstrable."9 The peremptory needs no stated reason, but each side receives only a limited number, the number the court must allow under 28 U.S.C. § 1870.10 A removal for cause is not a peremptory strike, so it leaves that allotment untouched.11 A party that wins a cause removal therefore keeps its scarce peremptories for jurors it merely suspects. A party whose challenge is denied must either accept the juror or spend a peremptory on someone it argued should have been excused, which leaves one fewer strike for another juror.
A denial does not end the matter. When the judge lets the challenged juror stay, the party may raise the same challenge on appeal from the final judgment, and the verdict will be overturned if the trial court's decision was an abuse of discretion.12 That standard is deferential. The appellate court asks whether the ruling stayed within the trial court's discretion, not whether it would have ruled the same way. Because review reaches the same challenge, the party should make it to the judge at trial.