How has the voir dire of a jury been applied in a sexual assault case?

The district court did not abuse its discretion by the manner in which it disposed of the pretrial publicity question. "Unless a trial judge clearly has erred in his estimation of the action needed to uncover and prevent prejudice from pretrial publicity, an appellate court should not intervene and impose its estimate." United States v. Polizzi, supra, 500 F.2d at 880. By its own observation of media coverage of appellant's case, the district court was able to determine the level of publicity surrounding the trial and the care required to screen out biased jurors. We are not in a position to assess more accurately how many headlines, editorials, and photographs the media devoted to appellant's activities, arrest, and trial. The absence of a significant number of jurors who were influenced by, or had even seen, coverage of appellant's case in newspapers and on radio and television reinforced the court's evaluation of this prosecution as one in which a highly intensive probe of each juror was unnecessary.

Only in a case involving extreme pretrial publicity, with demonstrated effects on the prospective jurors, have we held that a trial court's voir dire was inadequate. In Silverthorne v. United States, supra, 400 F.2d at 635, 639, all 65 veniremen admitted hearing about the case, and 30 percent of these panelists had formed an opinion about the defendant's guilt or innocence. We found that "under the peculiar and difficult facts of this case," the court had abused its discretion by conducting a cursory voir dire examination. Id. at 640. The factual pattern of United States v. Giese more closely resembles that of United States v. Polizzi, supra, however. In Polizzi, there had been some coverage of the defendant's trial, but the "trial judge's questions on pretrial publicity were limited to two questions addressed to the first prospective panel of jurors and later questions addressed to an individual prospective juror." Id. at 879-80 (footnotes omitted). Because the answers to these questions gave no indication of possible prejudice, we found the voir dire adequate. We make a comparable finding in the present case.