An attorney can exclude a potential juror in two ways, and knowing how to exclude a potential juror comes down to choosing between them: a challenge for cause, which requires a stated, legally recognized reason and has no numerical limit, or a peremptory challenge, which needs no reason at all but is capped at a small number per side. Both are exercised during voir dire, the questioning phase that opens every jury trial, and the judge has the final word on whether any given strike stands.
Voir Dire Is Where Exclusion Happens
Before a trial begins, a pool of potential jurors is brought into the courtroom for questioning. The judge typically leads, and in many courtrooms the attorneys are allowed follow-up questions directly to the panel. Questions cover a juror’s job, personal experiences, connections to anyone involved in the case, and views on the legal issues at stake.
This is the only chance an attorney has to develop the record needed for any later challenge. Every strike an attorney raises flows from something a juror said, hesitated over, or contradicted during this questioning. Attorneys pay attention to body language and inconsistencies as much as to the answers themselves.
Challenges for Cause
A challenge for cause asks the judge to remove a juror for a specific reason the law recognizes. There is no cap on how many an attorney can raise, but each has to survive the judge’s scrutiny. Federal law identifies several grounds: the juror may be unable to render impartial service, the juror’s participation would likely disrupt the proceedings, or a party can show “good cause” for removal.
In practice, the most common grounds are:
- Bias or prejudice, where the juror has expressed a fixed opinion about the case, a party, or the type of claim, and cannot set it aside.
- A personal connection to a party, witness, or attorney close enough that impartiality is in doubt.
- Prior knowledge of the facts from news coverage or personal involvement that prevents a fresh evaluation of the evidence.
- Hardship, such as a serious medical condition, sole caregiving responsibility for young children or elderly family members, or recent prior jury service.
The judge weighs each request individually and sometimes tries to rehabilitate a juror who has expressed mild bias by asking whether the juror can set the feeling aside and follow the law. A convincing “yes” can defeat the challenge. That is why experienced attorneys press hard during voir dire: a juror’s strong, on-the-record statement of bias makes the challenge very difficult for a judge to refuse.
Peremptory Challenges
A peremptory challenge lets an attorney strike a juror without giving any reason. The attorney simply tells the court the juror is excused. This is useful because gut instincts about a juror’s leanings often do not rise to provable bias, and peremptory challenges fill that gap. The tradeoff is scarcity: each side gets only a handful.
In federal court, the numbers are set by statute and by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Each side gets three peremptory challenges in civil cases and in misdemeanor cases, and twenty each in capital criminal cases. In non-capital felony cases, the prosecution gets six and the defense ten. When multiple defendants are tried together, the court can grant additional peremptory challenges and decide whether the defendants exercise them jointly or separately.
State courts set their own numbers, and they vary widely. In civil cases the typical range is roughly three to eight per side, while criminal cases often allow more. Because the total is so small, attorneys usually spend peremptory challenges only on jurors they could not remove for cause.
The Batson Limit on Peremptory Challenges
Peremptory challenges do not require a stated reason, but they are not unlimited in kind. In Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Supreme Court held that prosecutors cannot use peremptory strikes to remove jurors solely because of their race. The Equal Protection Clause forbids striking potential jurors “on account of their race or on the assumption that black jurors as a group will be unable impartially to consider the State’s case against a black defendant.”
The Court extended the same prohibition to gender-based strikes in J.E.B. v. Alabama, holding that the Equal Protection Clause “prohibits discrimination in jury selection on the basis of gender.” Lower courts have applied the same principle to ethnicity, and some jurisdictions have extended it to religious affiliation and sexual orientation.
When one side believes the other is using peremptory strikes to discriminate, the court runs through a three-step framework:
- The objecting party shows enough facts to raise an inference of discriminatory purpose. The bar is low; the totality of the circumstances just needs to suggest that a protected characteristic motivated the strike.
- The burden shifts to the striking attorney to offer a neutral explanation. The reason need not be persuasive or clever, but it has to be something other than the juror’s protected characteristic. A bare denial of discriminatory intent is not enough.
- The trial judge decides whether purposeful discrimination has been proven. This is a credibility call, and a facially neutral reason offered at step two can still be rejected here as pretext.
If the judge finds a Batson violation, the strike is denied and the juror stays on the panel. The judge can also raise the issue on the court’s own initiative if a pattern of strikes suggests targeting.
Disqualification Under Basic Eligibility Rules
Some exclusions happen before challenges even come into play, because a juror does not meet the threshold to serve. In federal court, a juror must be a United States citizen, at least eighteen years old, a resident of the judicial district for at least one year, and able to read, write, understand, and speak English adequately. A disqualifying mental or physical condition that cannot be accommodated, a pending felony charge punishable by more than a year, or a prior felony conviction without restored civil rights also disqualifies a person. State rules generally mirror these with local variations.
An attorney who realizes during voir dire that a juror does not meet one of these requirements has a clean, straightforward challenge for cause.
When Bias Only Surfaces After Trial
Occasionally a juror hides something during voir dire that would have supported exclusion. The Supreme Court’s decision in McDonough Power Equipment v. Greenwood sets a two-part test for a new trial in that situation. The moving party must show that the juror failed to answer a material question honestly during voir dire, and must also show that an honest answer would have provided a valid basis for a challenge for cause.
Both parts matter. Discovering after trial that a juror withheld information is not enough on its own; the concealed information has to be the kind that would have gotten the juror removed. The standard is deliberately high because reopening verdicts is serious, and courts do not want to invite background investigations after an unfavorable outcome. When genuine concealment of bias does surface, courts grant new trials, and a juror who lies under oath during voir dire can face contempt proceedings.