Criminal Jury Trials Research Articles

The Importance of DNA Evidence to Juries in Criminal Trials

This article draws upon interviews of real jurors in criminal trials in the Australian Capital Territory about scientific evidence and expert witnesses, which revealed that jurors' expectations of scientific evidence, particularly DNA profiling evidence, play an important role in determining whether or not the jurors, and juries, are able to comfortably deliver a guilty ***verdict or an acquittal. Where their expectations of DNA evidence are not met, high levels of juror frustration and speculation may culminate in hung juries.

Strength of evidence, extraevidentiary influence, and the liberation hypothesis: Data from the field.

To examine relationships between strength of evidence (SOE) and extraevidentiary variables in the context of Kalven and Zeisel's (The American Jury, 1966) liberation hypothesis, post-trial questionnaire data were collected from judges, attorneys, and jurors associated with 179 criminal jury trials. SOE ratings were strongly correlated with jury verdicts on the three most serious charges against the defendant, and several extraevidentiary variables (i.e., pretrial publicity, trial complexity, charge severity, and foreperson demographics) were moderately correlated with verdicts. Extraevidentiary-verdict relationships remained significant when SOE was controlled, although extraevidentiary variables yielded only modest improvement in classification accuracy beyond SOE. In partial support of the liberation hypothesis, several case-related extraevidentiary variables were significantly related to jury verdicts only when the prosecution's evidence was rated as moderately strong.

A Study on the US Criminal Jury Trial- focused on jury selection process -

A Study on the US Criminal Jury Trial- focused on jury selection process -

Blinded by Science

Using a social construction of reality perspective, this article examines the social distance between popular media depictions of criminal investigations and reality, and the extent to which these depictions influence criminal jury trials. Data were collected from a nationally representative, random sample of trial counsel and judges and was analyzed using qualitative methods. Results indicate there is a great deal of social distance between popular media depictions of criminal investigation and reality. Moreover, jurors appear to have no tools to assess the credibility of forensic testing on television shows or in trials. Furthermore, the social construction of reality on forensic television shows has not only influenced jury decisions but has also affected the ways in which trial counsel and judges do their jobs. Suggestions for further research and discussion of public policy implications are included in the study.

Testimony to Constitution Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Regarding the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007 and the Constitutional Duty of Congress to Restore Citizens' Seventh Amendment Rights

The Framers' election to preserve the common law right to civil jury trial in the Bill of Rights means that businesses may not remove this right from citizens by making its waiver a precondition to delivery of goods, services or employment. This conclusion is compelled by two considerations. First, the decision by the Framers to include this right in the Bill of Rights designates it as the kind of fundamental right waiver of which must be protected from any form of coercion, including the coercion imposed when a business makes waiver of the right a non-negotiable condition to delivery of a good, service or employment. Second, looking to the text of the Constitution, the decision by the Framers to protect the civil jury trial right with Article V's strong supermajority amendment requirements evinces their intent that the scope of the right's applicability not be subject to reduction by a less restrictive amendment mechanism - be it a majoritarian statutory amendment process (something the Framers contemplated) or what amounts to private legislation through standardized contractual waivers, a future development that the Framers, understandably, failed to anticipate. Pursuant to the Supreme Court's unconstitutional conditions doctrine, the state may not seek advance waiver of a citizen's Sixth Amendment criminal jury trial right in favor of bench trials in return for some unrelated benefit such as subsidized public housing or college tuition assistance. The coerciveness of such an offer becomes clear when one realizes that if the benefit offered were sufficiently valuable the citizen would readily waive her criminal jury trial right even if she strongly preferred jury trials over bench trials. Symmetrically, the Seventh Amendment civil jury trial right should enjoy the same protection against coercive removal as that provided the Sixth Amendment criminal jury trial right. Thus, a business should not be permitted to require that a citizen waive his jury trial right as a take-it-or-leave-it precondition to delivery of goods, services or employment. Coercion is coercion whether imposed by the state or a private party. Properly understood, it is protection against this form of coercion that constitutes the core minimum distinction between fundamental Constitutional rights and ordinary property interests. Viewed from a slightly different perspective, the very fact that lawmakers set forth an individual right applicable against other private parties in a constitution instead of a statute signals an intent that such right trump other persons' standard property rights where necessary to preserve citizens' ability to invoke such constitutional right. For example, in PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, California's Supreme Court held, and the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed, that California shopping centers may not make waiver of a customer's reasonably exercised state constitutional free speech and petition rights a condition to entry. Thus, the California Supreme Court found that the inclusion of these individual rights in California's constitution signals an intent that such rights trump a shopping center owner's common law rights to exclude people from its property and to control the activities permitted thereon. Following the same logic, the decision by the Framers to preserve in the Bill of Rights rather than in an ordinary statute (or not at all) the common law civil jury trial right signals an intent that such right trump the otherwise operable common law right of a business to make waiver of this or any other right a condition to delivery of goods, services or employment.

Necessity and Jury Nullification

Jury nullification refers to the behaviour of a jury that votes to acquit a defendant of criminal charges despite believing that: a) the defendant did in fact commit the actions with which she is charged; and, b) such actions are, indeed, prohibited by law. While there are many objections to this practice, the most striking thing about jury nullification is that nothing is done to actually prevent or punish jurors who behave this way. In this paper, I explore three rationales for why jury nullification is an officially tolerated, if not necessarily welcome, element of Anglo-American criminal law jury trials. All three of these rationales centre in one way or another on the idea that the very concept of a jury trial necessitates allowing the jury to extend its traditional purview in such a manner.

Deliberation Quality: A Preliminary Examination in Criminal Juries

Large‐scale studies of the deliberation process in actual juries have been surprisingly rare, and relatively little attention has been devoted to how well juries deliberate. This study identified a set of process‐related criteria relevant to the quality of criminal jury deliberations and examined empirical relationships between indicators of these criteria and jury verdicts. Data were obtained via posttrial surveys from jurors and legal professionals associated with 179 criminal jury trials in Indiana. The quality of deliberations varied across the process criteria, with juries reportedly doing fairly well in terms of understanding their instructions and reviewing the evidence, but not as well with regard to systematically gathering input from their members, adopting an evidence‐driven deliberation style, and avoiding factionalism. Several deliberation variables were also strongly related to jury verdicts, particularly the foreperson's initial verdict stance and the emergence of an identifiable pro‐acquittal faction leader. Discussion of reasonable doubt and thoroughness of evidence review also tended to be negatively correlated with conviction even when strength of evidence was controlled. This study calls attention to the importance of deliberation quality.

‘An important obligation of citizenship’: language, citizenship and jury service

This paper considers whether there should be the power to summon bilingual juries in criminal trials in Ireland and Wales. It will examine the relationship between jury service as an obligation and privilege of citizenship, and the eligibility for jury service of Irish and Welsh speakers as a linguistic group. It will also demonstrate the relationship between the citizenship argument in its collective context and the rights and interests of individual speakers of these languages within the criminal jury trial process. In doing so, it seeks to emphasise that this is a multidimensional issue which requires an evaluation from a combination of perspectives, both collective and individual. It is this combination of perspectives, taken conjunctively, that supports the case for bilingual juries. Moreover, this particular debate has a particular relevance to the wider debate on European citizenship and how Europe views the concept of multilingual citizenship within its constitutional framework. Indeed, it raises fundamental questions about how Europe manages its diverse cultural and linguistic heritage and how speakers of minority languages are integrated on a basis of equality and respect towards their cultural and linguistic autonomy. The paper also addresses the objections to bilingual juries and will explore how the advent of bilingual juries could continue to preserve the random selection principle (the primary objection to bilingual juries) sufficiently to bring about fair, impartial and competent tribunals.

PLEA BARGAINING AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE JURY

▪ Abstract The right to criminal jury trial is protected by the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of all 50 states. In practice, however, roughly 95% of persons convicted of felonies in America waive their right to trial by jury by entering guilty pleas. Most such pleas derive from plea bargaining, whereby defendants plead guilty in exchange for prosecutorial and judicial concessions. Although plea bargaining has generated an extensive scholarly literature, its history, until recently, has remained obscure. This review examines existing legal-historical scholarship on the origins and expansion of plea bargaining in the nineteenth century and explores the range of factors cited by legal historians for plea bargaining's rise. It reveals that plea bargaining was one of several methods employed by Anglo-American criminal justice administrators to dispose of criminal cases without juries. When compared with these other modes of bypassing trial by jury, plea bargaining appears less distinctive—and less distinctively American—than often considered.

Explaining Jury Verdicts: Is Leniency Bias for Real?

Laboratory research suggests juries that begin deliberation with a strong majority (i.e., 2/3 or more) usually end up choosing the verdict favored by this majority, whereas those without a strong majority generally acquit or hang. We tested the robustness of these findings in the field by examining trial and deliberation correlates of jury verdicts using data from 79 criminal jury trials held in Indiana. As expected, several trial characteristics and the first‐vote preference distribution were related to jury verdicts. However, there was no evidence of leniency bias—75% of those juries without a 2/3 majority on the first deliberation vote ended up convicting. Contributions of the study, limitations, and alternative explanations for the observed severity bias are discussed.

The role of the trial judge in a criminal jury trial.

The role of the trial judge in a criminal jury trial.

M Chesterman, J Chan and S Hampton, Managing Prejudicial Publicity: An Empirical Study of Criminal Jury Trials in New South Wales

M Chesterman, J Chan and S Hampton, Managing Prejudicial Publicity: An Empirical Study of Criminal Jury Trials in New South Wales

The Exclusion of the Clergy from Criminal Trial Juries: An Historical Perspective

Schedule 1 to the Juries Act 1974 provides that ‘[a] man in holy orders; a regular minister of any religious denomination [and] [a] vowed member of any religious order living in a monastery, convent or other religious community’ is ineligible to serve on a criminal (and also a civil) jury. This has been the law since 1972. For the remainder of this century members of the clergy have been eligible, but not compellable, jurors. In practice they did not serve. The change effected in 1972 is a reversion to the position which probably prevailed in the Middle Ages. Aside from the occasional official report, the liability of religious functionaries to serve on juries in criminal trials has been rarely written about. The last time it happened was in 1882. The object of this article is to fill the lacuna by tracing the history of the clergy's ineligibility for jury service in criminal trials and the reasons for it.

Social De-Construction of Race and Affirmative Action in Jury Selection

Recent race riots offer powerful and disturbing images and evidence of the cost of ignoring the apparent unfairness of court decisions made by all white juries. In the eyes of many marginalized segments of the community, the conviction of a black defendant or acquittal of a white defendant by an all white jury, against overwhelming evidence of his guilt, is deeply disturbing. The fact that a jury is all white has the powerful effect of racializing the jury proceeding. In the post-Civil War south, a series of similar atrocities occurred when the Ku Klux Klan's frenzy of violence and lynching , targeting blacks and white Republicans, went unpunished by all white juries. It is notorious that practically never have white lynching mobs been brought to court in the South, even when the killers are known to all in the community and are mentioned in name in the local press, Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 work on race relations once declared.' Today, issues of racially mixed juries and racial balance in cases involving inter-racial crimes pose unique challenges to our judiciary, our criminal justice system, and the community. This article examines possible applications of affirmative action in jury selection to create racially heterogeneous juries. Since race-conscious affirmative action must rely on the clear conceptualization of race and racial definitions, the article first presents critical analysis of the conceptualization and formulation of race and racial classification. Specifically, the first section of this article attempts to deconstruct racial identity as defined by government-defined racial categories, suggesting that race is a social construction and racial identity is subject to individual and societal manipulation. This allows many individuals to pass as members of different racial groups. The article then empirically examines public perceptions of the affirmative jury structures, focusing on the use of mandatory racial quotas to engineer racially heterogeneous juries in criminal trials, specifically the jury de medietate linguae, the Hennepin model, the social science model, and a peremptory inclusive selection method. The article finally argues that, given the strong endorsement for the Hennepin and social science models of affirmative juries, both legislative and court-initiated actions may be needed to energize the public debate concerning the importance of racially mixed juries, the size of mandated racial quotas, and implications regarding applications of affirmative action in jury proceedings. t Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz. Ph.D. & M.A., University of California, Riverside, 1985 & 1982; B.A., California State University, Fullerton, 1979. 1 am very grateful to Ian F. Haney Lopez for his helpful comments on the social deconstruction of race as well as John Brown Childs, G William Domhoff, and Richard Krooth for their critical comments on the earlier version of this article. 1. GUNNAR MYRDAL, AMERICAN DILEMMA 552 (1944). 1 Fukurai: Social De-Construction of Race and Affirmative Action in Jury Sel Published by Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository, 1999

Criminal Trial Juries in Australia: From Penal Colonies to a Federal Democracy

As recently as forty years ago, Australians within certain social classes and age-groups regularly described a journey to England as “going home,” even if they had in fact been born in Australia to Australian parents. It is therefore no surprise that, along with numerous other English social, cultural, and legal practices, the English model of trial by jury was adopted in each of the Australian colonies at a relatively early stage of its development and remains an enduring feature of the Australian legal system. Interesting adaptations of this model are to be found in Australia, as this article will demonstrate, but the core concept remains essentially unchanged.

A quota jury: affirmative action in jury selection

It is not too naive to believe that the use of affirmative action policies in the jury selection for the Rodney King beating trial of White police officers would have prevented the uprisings that followed their acquittal. The public outrage and riots that followed the verdict demonstrated the need for affirmative inclusion of racial minorities on jury trials to preserve and restore the public’s confidence and legitimacy of verdicts in racially motivated cases. While racially mixed juries offer many benefits, current jury selection procedures fail to provide much protection to members of racial minorities in criminal trials. From the source list to the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges, the current selection procedures provide almost no protection to racial minorities. The issue of preferential treatments of racial minorities in education, employment, and business has divided the nation and even some minority communities themselves. Affirmative action in jury proceedings and trials, however, has yet to receive much deserved attention and critical scrutiny. This article empirically examines public perceptions of possible applications of affirmative action mechanisms in criminal jury proceedings, focusing on the uses of mandatory racial quotas to engineer racially integrated juries in criminal trials. Three different types of racially mixed juries—the jury “de medietate linguae,” the Hennepin jury model, and the social science model—are examined, and the public’s perceptions of affirmative mechanisms ensuring minority participation on juries are analyzed. This article argues that the affirmative mechanism to secure racially mixed juries is essential to both the appearance and substance of fairness in criminal jury proceedings, and both the Hennepin model and the social science model are overwhelmingly supported as the ideal types of affirmative jury structures in creating racially heterogeneous juries.

Changing views of jury power: The nullification debate, 1787–1988.

This article highlights the major events and empirical research in the continuing debate over the power and competence of the jury in civil and criminal trials. The concept ofjury nullification, the power of the jury to return a verdict based upon their moral conscience despite the evidence and the law, is used as a convenient filter to discuss the legal and behavioral assumptions about jury power and performance. The legal, historical, and even behavioral contexts reflect a bipolar theme in the level of trust Americans have exhibited towards the jury system. One pole reflects the notion that juries lack predictability and rationality in their verdicts and are moved by emotional concerns. Antipodally, juries have been thought to reflect an historical competence at applying common sense notions of equity and rationality to conflicted and ambiguous cases. This article traces the history of these two views of jury power and competence. A critical review of the empirical research that may inform the debate about the jury's competence in both criminal and civil arenas is provided.

:Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800

:<i>Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800</i>

Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200-1800. J. S. Cockburn , Thomas A. Green

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsTwelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200-1800. J. S. Cockburn , Thomas A. Green C. W. BrooksC. W. Brooks Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 62, Number 3Sep., 1990 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/600552 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1990 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Twelve Good Men and True. The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200–1800. Edited by J. S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green. [Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1988. xvii, 402 and (Index) 11 pp. Hardback £24·60 net.

Twelve Good Men and True. The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200–1800. Edited by J. S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green. [Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1988. xvii, 402 and (Index) 11 pp. Hardback £24·60 net.