Stack And Sway: The New Science of Jury Consulting.

• Author: Samuels, Dorothy
• Position: Trial by Jury Consultant

STACK AND SWAY: The New Science of Jury Consulting by Neil Kressel and Dorit Kressel Westview Press, $27.50

SPEAKING TO REPORTERS FOLlowing his 1991 acquittal of charges that he raped a woman at the Kennedy family's Palm Beach estate one moonlit night over the previous Easter Weekend, William Kennedy Smith thanked his mother, his family, his defense lawyer, Roy Black, and members of the jury. In a true sign of the times, he also thanked the jury consultants who assisted his high-powered attorney in picking the sympathetic panel that cleared him in just 77 minutes.

For many Americans, including this one, the painstaking four weeks of jury selection that kicked off the Kennedy rape trial was a troubling introduction to the burgeoning field of jury consulting. Nowadays, it seems, nary an important criminal or civil proceeding is litigated in this country without one or both sides relying on expensive hired guns, typically with a background in psychology or the social sciences to assist the legal team in shaping trial strategy.

Deploying techniques imported from the world of commercial advertising and marketing, and less scientific sociological hocus-pocus, the growing cadre of trial consultants is transforming American justice, though not necessarily for the better. The services these consultants offer run from soup to nuts--beginning with help in selecting the "right" jury, and extending to conducting market surveys and mock trials designed to test the appeal of various theories of the case and hone the critical opening and closing arguments to achieve maximum legal and dramatic effect.

Since the Smith rape trial, trial consultants have played a key role in some of the nation's most celebrated cases, including the trial of Louise Woodward, the 18-year-old British nanny accused of killing eight-month old Mathew Eappen; the racial maelstrom known as the O.J. Simpson murder trial; and the trial of 12 mostly Arabic-speaking, Muslim defendants for plotting to blow up various NYC landmarks.

Should Osama bin Laden or any of his top lieutenants be captured alive in Afghanistan and put on trial before one the military tribunals authorized by President Bush, it is not farfetched to imagine some trial consultant being handed the infant profession's most challenging assignment yet. ("Osama," I can practically hear this vexed expert gently advising his client during witness prep, "you need to tone down that `death to America' stuff. It's not playing well...