to get ready for this trial? you already have your opening statement written, you re practicing it. you want to tell the jury a story. are you tweaking it based on who the jurors are now? absolutely. so you ve got engineers. you ve got lawyers. chris, when i was a prosecutor doing public corruption cases, i never wanted lawyers on my jury for the reasons that alan described, the concern is that other jurors will look to them as experts on the law rather than the judge. the prosecution is also worried that lawyers will have too high a standard about what proof beyond a reasonable doubt is. there s the same concern about scientists. there s an engineer on the jury. so yeah, you re tweaking your opening statement based on who these people are. and, again, six new jurors have been selected today. there s going to be a lot of investigation, googling, looking at social media for these six new folks over the weekend to see if there are any biases that
people who believes cases are won and lost in jury selection. this case couldn t be any bigger. can the mood in a room, can these kinds of exchanges make the job harder for someone like you or the lawyers? the good news is the judge is dismissing jurors that have a clear bias, and the way he did it with the self-removal, just to get everybody to say who can t be fair and impartial, i can t do this, they re gone. and then there s more questioning that goes into the process and more jurors are removed. it s really winnowing everything down. you don t want distracted jurors, jurors who have anxiety, jurors who aren t going to be able to give 100% of their commitment and focus, they re going to be removed. it s a little unnerving to see it unfold in court, but i think with the process it seems as though donald trump may not have a lot of supporters in new york county, he s in the process of getting a jury of his peers. that s all you can ask for from
to put anything they have aside and focus on the evidence and the arguments and render a fair decision by starting out neutral. paul, what s your reaction to what s happening inside that courtroom? i mean, again, these are not people who at least initially are going to be on the jury. these are alternates, and what are the chances that an alternate would ever even statistically get into the jury room, the deliberation room? yeah, so part of that is how long the trial lasts. this is a six-week trial. that s how long it s expected to be. that s kind of long. it wouldn t be surprising if one of the regular jurors has some kind of emergency where she has to step down. that s why there are six alternates here. and the concerns that these people are expressing, they re not unusual in high profile cases. jurors often have strong opinions. chris, i ve never seen anything quite like the level of these concerns and the emotion here
they made it that far along in the process, and what i d be interested in for both sides is what arguments are going to resonate with this jury? because everything leading up until now was more hypothetical in terms of arguments and case strategy, but now you have an audience, and so each side now wants to tailor their case to make arguments that resonate with the members of the jury and it seems like a well to do juror, jury that consists of people that productive members of society, maybe they don t pay such close attention to the cases that involve donald trump, and they haven t been paying that much close attention to this one but they re well informed. it looks like it s going to be a good jury on the surface. let me go back to vaughn, because i understand you have some new information about what s happening inside. reporter: we ve got two additional alternate jurors there, so what we have left are two open slots, chris, with 12 individuals who have gone through the extensive