Selecting a jury for the O.J. Simpson trial promises to be a legal minefield that is only partly explained by the intense spotlight on the process.
A series of Supreme Court rulings - including one just last April - has transformed jury selection in even the most routine cases into often major debates over race and gender.
"It's a mind-boggling exercise," says University of Chicago law professor Albert Alschuler.
The chief flash point will be peremptory challenges - the traditional ability of both sides in a criminal case to challenge and remove potential jurors for no stated reason.
Each side in Simpson's trial will have 20 such challenges, supplementing the challenges they and the judge can make to remove jurors for stated reasons - such as bias caused by pretrial publicity.
More than 300 years ago, peremptory challenges were described as an "arbitrary and capricious right" to be exercised with "full freedom." In the past two decades, judges have moved to restrict them because they were used to exclude minorities.
-- In 1986, the high court in Batson vs. Kentucky said "the defendant does have the right to be tried by a jury whose members are selected pursuant to non-discriminatory criteria." The ruling overturned the burglary conviction of a black man after prosecutors removed all four blacks from the jury panel.
-- Last April, the race rule of Batson was extended to cases in which potential jurors were excluded for reasons of sex. "We hold that gender, like race, is an unconstitutional proxy for juror competence," Justice Harry Blackmun said in J.E.B. vs. Alabama, where all males had been removed in a paternity trial.
But prosecutors and defense lawyers alike have had a difficult time actually applying both rulings. Since peremptory challenges by definition are unexplained, it is difficult to prove whether the decision to exlude was based on race or sex.
"If you haven't done anything really fishy, you can get away with a lot," says Alschuler. He suggests that Simpson's lawyers, who may believe that blacks would be more sympathetic to their defense, can achieve their goal of seating blacks by being sure to "zap a few blacks along with the whites."
Others don't see it as that simple, especially with the racially diverse Los Angeles jury pool.
"It's likely that within 10 jurors, the question will be raised" because a minority or female - or male - will be excluded, says Southwestern University Law School professor Myrna Raeder.
Some courts have taken a dim view of explanations for excluding a juror that simply mask a racial or gender motive, says Raeder.
In a California case in which a black man was excluded ostensibly because he lived in an area where residents are exposed to police, an appeals court said the reasoning was a sham substitute for race.
Last month, a New York appeals court struck down a murder conviction because prosecutors excluded a black potential juror on the grounds that she worked for the welfare department and might be too "liberal."
Where she worked was irrelevant, the court said, so race must have been the real motive. Striking another juror because of her clothing was also found unconstitutional.
In the Simpson case, objections about juror exclusions will have to be registered promptly to reserve the right to appeal later, says Raeder.
The defense is certain to be paying close attention to the prosecution's jury strikes. Bias in jury selection is deemed to be a serious enough error to warrant reversal of a conviction.
Viewers nationwide, as a result, may get a marathon-length education in the complexity of jury selection. Some experts think that exposure, plus the Supreme Court's steady line of cases, will lead to the end of peremptory challenges.
Every potential juror has a race and a gender, so every exclusion of a potential juror in the Simpson case - or any other case - provides a possible grounds for appeal.
