Christian has admitted to carrying out the stabbings, but has pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, and according to a psychological evaluation requested by his attorneys, he claims he was on “auto-pilot” during the incident and “feared a physical attack” by the men.

Chapter two : Choosing a jury

Jury selection begins Tuesday, following years of intense media coverage examining the stabbings and Christian himself. In a case like this, is it difficult, or even impossible, to find truly impartial jurors?

Weaver: I mean, there's no question that probably 99% of this jury pool will have seen, heard or read something about the case, but the test is whether or not they can put aside anything that they may have read, heard and seen and judge the case solely on the evidence that's produced during the course of the trial and follow the directions on ... what law applies to this case. There are a number of counts in the case, so I think it's possible to get jurors who are able to do that. A lot of it's going to depend upon the relationship that the judge in this case, Judge Albrecht who is an excellent judge, [has] with those jurors. Because I think particularly in long cases, jurors come in, and they're a little wary of the lawyers. But they really have a tendency to bond to the judge and to rise to the occasion to do what's the right thing to do.

Heyworth: I think a lot of the people might just say they can't be on the case because of the type of case that it is. I've had that happen in other aggravated murder trials where people are just far too upset about the facts that they choose not to be on the jury, and if they say that they can get off of the jury very easily because it can't be fair. And I suspect that a number of people are going to say that in this particular case.

Ludwig: I think that, in some ways, we don't give jurors quite enough credit. I mean, they take this job, in my experience, very seriously. And you know in this day and age, people are pretty sophisticated. I mean, it's not Walter Cronkite telling it to you anymore, you know, the one authoritative source of information. It's a lot of disparate sources of information, and people can kind of pick and choose what they listen to. So the first thing is, I'm not sure that you should expect that all the jurors in the panel have been exposed to media about this because that's not a guarantee. But even if they have been exposed to some media, it hasn't necessarily created in them a fixed and unmovable opinion about what took place.

What kinds of questions would you be asking potential jurors, and what qualities would you be looking for?

Weaver: You will want to question any juror who says that they can be fair to see whether or not there's an attitude or hidden bias that might about that kind of a thing that might prevent them from being fair. And at this stage… the evidence hasn't come in. So the lawyers have to cautiously describe or anticipate what may be coming in as evidence and not and direct their questions based upon that… I think the questions will go to the threshold of explosive answers in certain cases with certain perspective jurors, and this judge may need to take that a juror with the lawyers in camera to do an in camera review. So whatever that juror says in response to those questions is not heard by everybody else. So for example, if in response to a question, ‘What have you seen on KGW about this case?’ And a juror says something that sounds very prejudicial, then if those other jurors haven't heard that [on KGW], there's now a problem created by that answer with these other perspective jurors.

Heyworth: As an ex-prosecutor, I would want some intelligent people on there because indeed, if this "guilty except for insanity" case comes up, you have to parse through the law in order to determine whether or not that's an accurate defense or a viable defense… I would just want average Americans because those people know what it's like to live an average life. And they also watch television. They do all sorts of things… where they have seen things on the news about people who act in a vicious manner, and I suspect that that's not going to cause most people to want to disqualify themselves because we see all of this stuff in the media all the time.