Jury Composition Research Articles

The Problematic Issues of Jury Selection

It is known that the jury is not an institutionally separate legal entity. It functions alongside the Court of First Instance and is a special form of administration of justice. Unlike ordinary proceedings when a judge makes a decision based on the law, a jury trial relies on the opinions of ordinary citizens applying to their "inner voice" - conscience, "common sense", folk wisdom and intelligence, public morality, sense of justice. That is why jury trial is considered the highest expression of democracy. It is an interesting institution in many ways. The article reviews the problematic issues of jury selection.
 The article analyses theoretical and practical aspects of selecting non-professional judges, the preconditions of their selection, recusals and the jury composition. Legislative changes have been evaluated positively, but there are still challenges. Accordingly, the problems associated with jury selection are identified and the specific recommendations are made to prevent the process from delaying and choose independent, unbiased jurors.

Biases in elections with well‐informed voters: Evidence from public voting for football awards

AbstractObjectivesHow much does group membership influence voting behavior? This article adds to existing work by considering a novel context where voting is public and voters are well‐informed.MethodsThe article analyzes public votes in a prominent award for the best football player in the world. It uses ordered probit regressions to assess the extent to which votes by players, coaches, and journalists are related to national, regional, cultural, racial, and religious affinities between voters and candidates controlling for measures of player performance and celebrity.ResultsThe estimates indicate that while player performance does matter, a number of group‐based characteristics continue to influence voting. Some of these effects appear to be rooted in incentives—a tendency to vote for co‐nationals and teammates—but others—such as a tendency to vote based on geographical, racial, and religious similarities—are rooted more in group affinities.ConclusionsThe analysis provides relatively strong support for the group‐based theory of democracy championed by Achen and Bartels as opposed to a theory of democracy founded on individual rational choice. The specific case considered suggests that more attention should be given to the composition of juries that choose the winners of prizes.

The ambivalence of recognition: How awarded journalists assess the value of journalism prizes

In times of increasingly precarious media work, being recognized for one’s performance has become more and more important for journalists’ sense of well-being and can even constitute a competitive advantage in the journalistic field. As material forms of recognition, journalism awards decisively contribute to accumulated journalistic capital and work as an instrument of cultural hierarchy within the field. However, despite the growth in journalistic prizes and the added importance of recognition in times of crisis, we still have an incomplete understanding of how journalists themselves assess the meaning of awards for their position in the field. In this study, we therefore focus on journalists’ evaluations of awards. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with young awarded journalists we explore the meaning of prizes to better understand the relationship between recognition and capital. Our results indicate that from the perspective of awarded journalists receiving an award does not automatically contribute to prestige and hence the accumulation of journalistic capital. Instead, our study suggests that journalists consider prizes to be an ambiguous and ambivalent form of recognition. Whether an award is considered prestigious depends on aspects such as its scarcity, its sponsors, the composition of juries, the visibility of the award in the industry as well as the genre and category that is awarded.

Citizens’ juries and their role in improved alcohol policy: damp squib, or useful tool?

Background Increasing public participation has the potential to inform better alcohol policy. One method for increasing participation is the citizens’ jury – a strategy that has been both touted as a panacea for issues of democratic representation and dismissed as ineffective in impacting policy. Seeking to look past both hype and cynicism, we reflect on two Australian juries with an aim to identify both the potentials and pitfalls of the use of citizens’ juries in alcohol policy. Methods Using public documentation, we analyse two alcohol-related citizens’ jury processes – one in Adelaide, SA, and one in Sydney, NSW – with respect to their implications for alcohol policy development. We reflect on matters of participation, deliberation, authority, remit, and impact of recommendations. Findings The case studies indicate the importance of clear aims; whether these are instrumental and focussed on developing specific alcohol policy recommendations or focussed on broader epistemic democratic effects. Jury composition, the notion of vested interests, and the extent of juries’ authorising power are key considerations for juries deliberating on alcohol policy. Conclusions Due to the nature of policy-making, no single strategy can be a democratic panacea. However, we find that carefully considered and situationally aware elements of citizens’ juries may be useful in alcohol policy development.

What drives a jury’s deliberation? The influence of pretrial publicity and jury composition on deliberation slant and content.

What drives a jury’s deliberation? The influence of pretrial publicity and jury composition on deliberation slant and content.

The Importance of Context and the Effect of Information and Deliberation on Opinion Change Regarding Environmental Issues in Citizens’ Juries

Citizens’ juries have become a popular method for engaging citizens in deliberation about complex public policy issues, such as climate action and sustainable development. Empirical evidence routinely indicates that jurors change their minds throughout the process. What is less clear is when and why this occurs and whether the causes are consistent across juries that consider the same topic but are situated within different contexts. We present evidence of opinion change in citizens’ juries through a natural experiment, contrasting three local contexts of onshore windfarm development in Scotland; viz. existing, planned, and absent. Jurors’ individual opinions of climate change, wind energy, and windfarms were measured through questionnaires at four time points: the start, following information-giving, reflection, and deliberation. Statistical examination of jurors’ responses, through paired sample t-tests, Wilcoxon sign-tests, and Generalised Least Squares regression, reveals to what extent substantive changes were associated with different phases and locational contexts. In all three juries, opinion change occurs throughout the process, on different topics, and to different degrees. While the information phase consistently influences jurors’ opinions the most, jury composition affects the magnitude and direction of opinion change, with outcomes contingent on contexts. Our findings are important for informing how mini-publics are designed and used to inform environmental policy-making at different scales.

Supplemental Material for What Drives a Jury’s Deliberation? The Influence of Pretrial Publicity and Jury Composition on Deliberation Slant and Content

Supplemental Material for What Drives a Jury’s Deliberation? The Influence of Pretrial Publicity and Jury Composition on Deliberation Slant and Content

Racially Imbalanced Peremptory Challenges by the Defense as a Reactionary Process

The use of peremptory challenges in American criminal trials has been found to be racially discriminatory despite race-based motivation being unconstitutional in jury selection. One argument made in defense of peremptory challenges is that the prosecution and the defense counteract each other, and “cancel out” each other’s impact. Using data from 208 criminal trials in Mississippi, this study examines whether the prosecution and defense counteract each other and what impact this has on juries. Findings suggest that the prosecution has a significant effect on the defense’s use of peremptory challenges. Although the average proportion of Black jurors is not significantly different as a result of peremptory challenges, the greater dispersion in proportions increases the volatility in jury composition.

Gender Composition of Juries and Gender Bias: Performance Evaluations in Professional Diving

We investigate whether the gender of judges as well as the gender composition of juries affect individual performance evaluations using information on single diving competitions at three World Championships. Our results indicate that gender per se does not affect individual opinions, while gender composition does. The more judges of the same gender as the athlete are part of a jury, the higher is the rating of both same- and opposite-gender judges. Thus, findings indicate that female (male) athletes benefit from juries who consist of mostly female (male) judges.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

An Empirical Examination of Civil Voir Dire: Implications for Meeting Constitutional Guarantees and Suggested Best Practices

In civil litigation voir dire (jury selection) has a fundamental impact on jury composition, and by extension, is inextricably entangled with constitutional, statutory, and precedential guarantees regarding an impartial jury of the parties' peers. However, despite its deep influence on jury composition, and by extension trial outcomes, the rules for jury selection vary wildly by jurisdiction, ranging from almost no questioning of jurors at all to extensive questioning that dives into details of the underlying cases. Indeed, selection can take a week in some states and 20 minutes in others. This article involves a first of its kind empirical study that analyzes results from a national sample of over 2,000 mock jurors. The study measures the impact of jury selection across three distinct civil case presentations based on actual cases. It measures existing jury biases, explores how those biases impact juror decisions, considers whether existing methods common to voir dire sufficiently identify those biases, and analyzes whether existing methods for curing such biases are effective. It concludes that a) existing biases, many of which are prevalent in the existing jury population, fundamentally impact juror decision making - sometimes in ways that are inappropriate, b) these biases can harm both sides of civil litigation but they skew in favor of civil defendants, c) these biases will often go unidentified under existing rules so that an impartial jury is not assured, d) this problem is not cured by existing interventions, and e) jurors are largely blind to the role bias plays in their decision making. The article concludes with best practices that could be useful to attorneys, legislators, and judges.

Jurors' cognitive depletion and performance during jury deliberation as a function of jury diversity and defendant race.

Racial diversity in juries, meant to ensure representation of minority voices, can also reduce racial bias in verdicts and improve group performance during deliberation (Sommers, 2006). Although jury diversity might increase cognitive depletion because it involves interracial interactions (Richeson & Shelton, 2003), it might also reduce racial disparity in verdicts and deliberation quality by improving the quality of deliberation for Black defendants. In 6-person juries that included 2 White or 2 Black confederates, White jurors viewed trial evidence including a defendant race manipulation (White, Black) and completed measures of cognitive depletion and case facts recall. Deliberation transcripts were coded for the number of total, correct, and new case facts mentioned by jurors. As predicted, jurors in diverse versus all-White juries were more depleted after deliberation, but depletion was not related to deliberation performance. For the Black defendant, jurors on diverse (vs. homogeneous) juries discussed more case facts; for the White defendant, the effect was not significant. Jurors on all-White juries discussed more case facts when they judged a White (vs. Black) defendant, but this difference was not significant for jurors on diverse juries. Thus, jury diversity reduced racial disparity in the quality of deliberation. Before and after deliberation, jurors were less likely to convict the Black (vs. White) defendant regardless of jury composition. These findings reinforce the importance of constructing racially diverse juries, given that they may be better equipped to evaluate trial evidence for both Black and White defendants despite the cognitive demand of deliberating within a diverse group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Gender discrimination and juries in the 20th century

This article presents a comparative study of the 20th-century exclusion of women from participation on juries. It explains that until the 1970s, and in some cases even the 1990s, substantial formal limitations on jury franchise were placed on women in Ireland, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. This situation existed notwithstanding women’s equality of political franchise through the vote and despite judicial references to the centrality of the jury. While in England and Wales women were not treated differently from men in formal terms after the 1920s, property qualifications denied them substantive equality and informal limitations excluded women disproportionately. We highlight some distinctive features of the English experience as compared and contrasted with the laws and policies on jury composition operating in other jurisdictions, and ask whether the legacies left by the traditionally unrepresentative jury and the battles for gender equality offer lessons relevant to understanding jury trials in contemporary times.

Проблемы формирования коллегии присяжных заседателей: метод случайной выборки

Проблемы формирования коллегии присяжных заседателей: метод случайной выборки

The Jury Sunshine Project: Jury Selection Data as a Political Issue

Lawyers treat jury selection — no surprise here — as an issue to litigate. In this article, we stand outside the litigator’s role and look at jury selection from the viewpoint of citizens and voters. As citizens, we believe that the composition of juries in criminal cases deserves political debate outside the courtroom. Voters should use the jury selection habits of judges and prosecutors when deciding whether to re-elect the incumbents to those offices. More generally, jury composition offers a stress test for the overall health of local criminal justice. Conditions are unhealthy when the full-time professionals of criminal justice build juries that exclude parts of the local community, particularly when they exclude members of traditionally marginalized groups such as racial minorities. Every sector of society should participate in the administration of criminal justice. This political problem starts as a public records problem. As we discuss in Part I of this article, limited public access to court data reinforces the single-case focus of the legal doctrines related to jury selection. Poor access to records is the single largest reason why jury selection cannot break out of the litigator’s framework to become a normal topic for political debate. As we describe in Part II, we worked with dozens of students, librarians, and court personnel to collect jury selection documents from individual case files and assembled them into a single database, which we call “The Jury Sunshine Project.” In Part III, we present some initial findings from the Jury Sunshine Project to illustrate how public data might generate political debate beyond the courtroom. Part IV explores the possible explanations for the racial patterns that we observed in jury selection. Some accounts of this data point to benign non-racial factors as the real explanation for the patterns we observed. Finally, in Part V we generalize from our data about the race of jurors to ask more generally how accessible public records could transform criminal justice.

A New Jury Model in the Republic of Korea

The paper considers the issue of jury court development in the Republic of Korea in XXI century. The jury system introduction into Korea legislation is looked at. The analysis of the jury in the Republic of Korea is aimed at considering the trend of jury introduction in the countries lacking the experience in this institute implementation. The Korean jury model is of interest as it gives the solution for two main drawbacks of the jury: high costs of a lawsuit and time-consuming court procedures. The reforms being introduced into the Korean law system achieve the main purposes similar to the on-going democratic reforms in Japan. Despite this, the jury in Korea was not just a borrowed jury form which exists in the common-law countries (the USA, Great Britain, etc.). There are some peculiarities in jury specifically typical for South Korea. The requirements for the jury members, jury composition, voting procedure in delivering a verdict are analyzed. The consultative nature of the jury's verdict not being obligatory for the court is emphasized. However, in many cases the jury decisions are similar to the final decision of the court. The court practices in considering the criminal trials with the jury participation are given. The author arrives at the conclusion that jury introduction in the Republic of Korea is a vivid event in the history, influences the law culture and legal awareness of the citizens, which is particularly important for any state to function and to develop the society in an appropriate way. The jury system in the Republic of Korea can be distributed into the countries of the Asian-Pacific region.

Predictors of Death Sentencing for Minority, Equal, and Majority Female Juries in Capital Murder Trials

The relatively small body of prior research investigating whether the sex composition of juries impacts sentencing decisions has produced equivocal results. Exploring this topic further, the current study used a large sample of capital cases from North Carolina (n = 675) to examine (a) whether jury sex composition predicted jury capital punishment sentencing decisions; and (b) whether there were different models of sentencing for male-majority, equal male-female, and female-majority juries. When we controlled for a number of legal and extralegal factors, our findings indicated that jury sex composition was independently related to sentencing outcomes. Specifically, equal male-female juries were significantly more likely and female-majority juries were significantly less likely to choose the death penalty versus a sentence of life in prison. In addition, different models (predictors) of sentencing were revealed for each of the jury sex compositions. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Legal and Institutional Measures to Reform Participatory Trials for Sex Crime Cases

The five-year experimental period of the “Citizen Participatory Trial System,” implemented in 2008, has come to an end. Currently, the people are waiting for the final form of the participatory trial system to be established. Based on the analysis of operation results of the participatory trial system, the Committee for Citizens’ Participation in the Judicial System under the Supreme Court of Korea has resolved an amendment direction of the Act on Citizen Participation in Criminal Trials (the “Act”) in March 2013. According to the direction, the Ministry of Justice worked out a partially revised bill of the Act. However, the aforementioned bill has been evaluated as being insufficient in properly reflecting public interest, i.e., the protection of sex crime victims. This study specifically focuses on sex crime cases among the actual operation data of the participatory trial system published by the Committee for Citizens’ Participation in the Judicial System, and reanalyzes the results of and issues with the implementation of participatory trials. Furthermore, through applying the contents of legislation and legislative arguments aimed at protecting sex crime victims in participatory sex crime trials, the authors suggest improvement measures that can not only prevent possible secondary victimization such as the disclosure of sex crime victims’ identities and the violation of their privacy in the participatory trial procedure, but also ease their psychological burdens. The authors propose three legal and institutional measures of improvement. First, in regard to the eligible cases for participatory trials and the decision for exclusion prescribed in the Act, the defendant’s request for a participatory trial and the sex crime victim’s right of objection to such a trial should be considered properly on equal footing to prevent secondary victimization, and consequently, the aforementioned victim’s right of objection should be further strengthened. Second, as for the argument that at least a certain number of female jurors should mandatorily take part in a participatory trial, the authors believe that a careful approach should be taken based on the analysis of the five-year operation results and performance, while recognizing the necessity to secure fairness in jury composition. Lastly, with respect to the matter of victims/witnesses and their interrogation in the participatory trial procedure for sex crimes, it is necessary to implement a legislative measure that can resolve the sex crime victims’ mental distress deriving from concerns about their identities being disclosed and their privacy being violated in front of jurors.

Peremptory Challenges and Jury Selection

I examine how peremptory challenges, which are vetoes that attorneys may use to reject prospective jurors, affect jury composition. The purpose of peremptory challenges is to eliminate biased jurors; however, I show that under the two most common rules used in the United States, peremptory challenges actually increase the probability of juries composed entirely of members on one extreme or another of some ideological spectrum. I then show that it is not possible to design a peremptory-challenge procedure that unambiguously makes such juries less likely. I show that if unanimity is required for conviction, the distribution of juror types is symmetric about some mean type, and each attorney has the same number of challenges, then challenges benefit the prosecution.

Judicial privilgies of Saxons in mixed disputes in Medieval Serbia

Based on the contemporary testimonies, wealth of the Serbian medieval kings was significantly increased by exploitation of number of precious metal mines that existed in their realm. Beginnings of the mine exploitation in medieval Serbia are related to the settlements of Saxon miners. Saxons were mining experts in medieval Europe who worked in distant mines far away from their homeland Saxony. They worked in this profitable mining business not only in Serbia, but also in Bohemia, Hungary (Transylvania and modern Slovakia) and Bosnia. The settlement of Saxons in Serbia occurred in time of the reign of King Stefan Uros I (1234-1276). Although without preserved sources which could directly support this thesis, Serbian historiography advocates that certain privileges were granted to the Roman Catholic Saxons at the time of their migration in orthodox Serbia. It appears that these privileges included self-government, freedom of religion, and mining concessions. Also judicial privileges are often mentioned in historiography especially the right of Saxons to one half of the members of their ethnicity in judicial collegium and jury in the case of a dispute with member of another ethic group. This paper attempts to test the thesis related to composition of mixed courts and juries by applying historical method, and linguistic, systemic and historical interpretation of the sources such as King's Charters issued to Dubrovnik, Dusan's Code and Despot Stefan's Mining Code.