The Partial Juror: Correlates and Causes of Prejudgment

Abstract

Data from two 1979 potential juror surveys concerning three criminal cases in Yolo County, California, form the basis for an analysis of opinions indicative of prejudgment in those cases. Strong bivariate relationships are demonstrated between knowledge about a specific case, general attitudes on crime, gender, and education level, on the one hand, and two measures of propensity to prejudge a defendant's guilt, on the other. Further, multivariate discriminant function analysis is used to show that these four independent variables taken together are able to produce significant increases in the ability to make predictions of prejudging opinions on the part of the respondents and that knowledge about a specific case is by far the most important variable in determining such predictions.