Jury selection complete after slow process
A jury has been selected for former House Speaker Michael Madigan's corruption trial.
On Monday morning, the jury was made up of eight women and four men, but two more alternates were picked throughout the day.
Jury selection for Madigan's trial was always going to be a slow and deliberate process. Due to the high-profile nature of the case, Judge Blakey this summer agreed to keep prospective jurors' names anonymous and question them individually after completing a lengthy questionnaire.
But selecting the 12-member jury and six alternate jurors from the nearly 200-person jury pool took more than twice as long as originally scheduled. By the time the final alternates are chosen on Monday, the seven-day process will have lasted longer than the entire related AT&T trial last month.
The dozens of prospective jurors who made it into the courtroom for questioning were largely white and were also disproportionately older, likely due to the number of those working-age pool members who were immediately eliminated by their inability to commit to an estimated 11 weeks of trial.
After spending on average more than half an hour with each prospective juror during questioning aimed at flagging any unconscious biases, the parties finally found their 12th member on Thursday morning. The jury includes a racially diverse group of eight women and four men ranging from their early 20s to retirees.
Jury members include a teacher, an Amazon warehouse worker and a Goodwill donation center employee. The jury also has a number of health care workers, including an overnight nurse and two who work in patient scheduling at separate Chicago hospitals.
The final juror works at yet another Chicago hospital and told a Madigan attorney that he'd heard the speaker's name but wasn't sure what position he'd held.
"I know he's been a longtime leader, well-known name in Illinois and the city but I - honestly, I'm a little embarrassed ... I don't follow politics that much," he said.
But most of the jury is in the same boat. Some were vaguely aware of Madigan's case and last year's ComEd trial from headlines and mentions on TV news, though others had never heard the speaker's name before.
One juror confessed that when she told her best friend about her jury summons, the friend predicted that she was being called for the Madigan case - and told her to "vote guilty" for the longtime Democratic powerbroker.
"She's a Trumper," the juror said of her friend, referring to her support for former President Donald Trump. "She really hates all Democrats except me, maybe."
The same juror also elicited a rare moment of laughter from Madigan when she told his attorney Tom Breen that he looked like the actor Eric Roberts.
Even the judge joined in on the reaction shared by the rest of the courtroom.
"Eric Roberts?" Blakey repeated incredulously. "Wow."
