Abstract

Abstract This article considers a question of current legal interest: whether the present jury selection procedure used in cases in which capital punishment is a possibility is biased against the defense. Section 1 gives the legal background of the question addressed here. Section 2 describes two major studies on jurors in capital cases that were recently presented to the California Supreme Court in Hovey v. Superior Court (1980): the Fitzgerald and Ellsworth (1984) work on the attitudes of jurors favoring either the defense or the prosecution, and the Cowan, Thompson, and Ellsworth (1984) experiment on juror behavior. The response of the California Supreme Court in Hovey is then discussed.

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