Jury Room Research Articles

Some Questions of Remitting a Sentence Based on the Verdict of the Jury

The article is devoted to the analysis of court practice connected with the remission of sentences based on the verdict of the jury. The author also describes a number of problematic situations emerging at the stage of stating questions to the jury, including the problem of the meaning and constructive content of the questions to the jury, the procedural rules for the jury instructions by the president judge, the order of conducting consultations and voting in the jury room and rendering a verdict. The author highlights the problem of insufficient legal regulation in the criminal procedure legislation. The argumentation of the conclusions is based on studying the statistical data of the Court Department under the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, the reviews of court practice, acts of judicial power as well as research publications on the topic. The author concludes that a more detailed interpretation of the clauses of Art. 339 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation is necessary.

그랜드호텔 형식 영화의 패러디적 변용상 -『12인의 성난 사람들』과 『12인의 상냥한 일본인』의 대비를 중심으로 -

In this paper, I contrasted the American film 12 Angry Men, which shows the essence of a court play, using the spatial constraint properties of a Grand hotel style film that tracks the psychological trends and motive of characters in a limited space and the Japanese film 12 Sweet Japanese which parodies it. Through this, it is confirmed 12 Sweet Japanese is different from the Chinese film 12 Citizens, which is simply a remake of the stage in China and the Russian film 12 People''s Jury, whose original characteristics are diluted with excessive political colors and sociality. While adhering to the original essence of the Grand hotel style, it was examined that the original work was creatively reconstructed. Like the original 12 Angry Men, which specifically visualizes the psychological trends of characters sharing jury room, the same spatial background by commanding of various camera-work, 12 Sweet Japanese adheres to the formal characteristics of the Grand hotel style film by capturing the psychological curves of various characters amid tension and conflict in closed space. However, following the replacement of the title (Angry), which symbolizes the extraversion of the Americans, with the title (Sweet), which symbolizes the introverted temperament of Japanese, the heavy theme of the original work, which pinpoints the problem of universal human consciousness, which is swept away by irrational agitation is microscopically expressed as a daily issue of Japanese called “interhumanism”. Through this, while maintaining the form of the original work, it is proceeding to a parody of substituting a heterogeneous theme or content. Accordingly, it seems that No. 2, who alone pleads guilty and confronted the remaining 11 people, mimics the original protagonist No. 8. In fact, however, his role is reversed as an antagonist, resulting in a satirical transformation of the character whose status is exchanged between the guiltist and the innocent. Thus, it ultimately triggers a transformation of the plot by replacing the grim court play in which a fierce legal battle is unfolded over the truth of the murder case with a chat play with a light atmosphere that reveals the daily thoughts and lifestyles of Japanese. Through this, it was confirmed that 12 Sweet Japanese is enhancing new artistic value by adhering to the formal characteristics of the original 12 Angry Men as a grand hotel-style film, but also by making satirical variations on themes and other elements.

Facts into faults: The grammar of guilt in jury deliberations

Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations (CCIs), whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a normal, innocent person would have done, with the implication that the discrepancy indicates guilt. We examine the logic, variants, sequential precursors, and immediate consequences of this phenomenon in two real-life American criminal juries deliberating the same charges. This study offers a rare glimpse into the operation of real (rather than mock) juries, and specifically the way in which they appropriate a practice from ordinary conversation in order to perform the unordinary work demanded of them by the legal system.

Janus turns out to be one-faced: the judgment of the Russian Constitutional Court on the permissibility of examination of jurors in the light of foreign law

According to Article 56 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure, “a judge and a juror may not be examined as a witness about the circumstances of a criminal case which they have become aware of while participating in it”. The Russian Supreme Court has interpreted this rule as imposing a categorical prohibition to examine a juror even though the defense submits and tries to prove that jurors were not impartial due to the extraneous influence and unlawful threats that they confronted in a jury room. As a result, this approach, instead of ensuring the confidentiality of jury deliberations, has been rather used to preclude the discovery of procedural irregularities in reaching a verdict. In its judgment of 7 July 2020, the Russian Constitutional Court has softened this unreasonable restriction by ruling that jurors’ witness immunity is not absolute and appellate courts must use their testimony to establish facts relating to alleged attempts to place unlawful pressure on a jury by undermining the secrecy of jury deliberations. Based on a case file, including the petition that the author of this article drafted and filed to the Russian Constitutional Court, the article reconstructs the arguments invoked by the parties in the course of constitutional proceedings and assesses the approach taken by the Russian Constitutional Court to decide the case. In particular, the court has allowed examining jurors, but only with their consent. Having studied the experience of the countries where a jury system has been present for a long time, namely the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, the author argues that a post-trial examination of jurors is a recognized way to ensure the right of a defendant to an impartial jury. Among other things, the foreign jurisdictions obligate a juror to inform a judge about attempts to unlawfully influence a jury, empowers a judge to determine if there are sufficient grounds for summoning jurors as witnesses, and sets standards of examination. However, none of these legal orders requires that a juror give consent for examination. Therefore, the article concludes that the integrity of jurors in Russia should be protected not by enabling them to testify before an appellate court at their discretion but by strengthening their legal immunity, which in turn will strike an optimal balance between competing constitutional values.

Radical enfranchisement in the jury room and public life

Radical enfranchisement in the jury room and public life

Redemptive Constitutionalism in the Jury Room and Public Life

Redemptive Constitutionalism in the Jury Room and Public Life Mark Golub (bio) Sonali Chakravarti. Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 168 pp. $2500 (pb). ISBN: 9780226654294. It is hard to think of a time, at least since the twentieth century, when public confidence in legal institutions has been lower or threats to the rule of law have been so conspicuously on display. We may view this current era of threat through a lens of nostalgia for a bygone age thought to be less polarized and corrupt, or it may be viewed more cynically, as disillusionment with a form of power that law must simultaneously enact and conceal as part of its legitimizing function; in either case, theorizing about law in these precarious times can take on a kind of paranoid sensibility. One's critique may feel always too small for the scale of the problem, while also at risk of sawing through the branch that holds our weight above something far worse. Each of the books included in this Roundtable bear the trace of such a problematic. Each, in their own way, may be read as responding to the potential for law to be both a check on political power and an expression of that power; a promise of protection from arbitrary rule, but also its most effective institutionalization; a potential remedy for social injustice and also, in its carceral form especially, a brutally efficient regime of racial violence. [End Page 840] In many ways, Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life marks a continuation of Sonali Chakravarti's careful thinking about institutional responses to social crises and systemic injustice. Her first book, Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2014), emphasized the virtue of anger as a beneficial yet potentially disruptive political affect in the transition from apartheid South Africa. Typically thought to conflict with democratic values of rational deliberation and impartiality, anger's disruptive potential in Sing the Rage is also crucially generative. It does not facilitate a "return to normal" after periods of violent upheaval, but instead intervenes to shift the boundaries of responsibility for mass violence and to name society's deep complicity with human rights violations, atrocities, and mass killings. But institutional context is equally important as emotion or affect for Chakravarti, who is attentive to how the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) worked to structure the reception of victim testimony in ways that might contribute to the building of a new and democratic Republic of South Africa. Anger is powerful, Chakravarti reminds us, because it is dangerous, and so "the expression of anger is a reminder of the need for democratic institutions, just as it shows the limits of consensus within them" (176). Legal institutions play a similar role in her new book. Only here, the source of disruption (at once dangerous and necessary) has migrated from the witness stand to the jury room. The book opens with an approving nod to Henry Fonda's heroic performance as Juror #8 in the classic film, 12 Angry Men—although, curiously, Fonda's character remains preternaturally calm, even when facing the angry outbursts of fellow jurors, who would uncritically convict without so much as a pretense of deliberation. Juror #8 is disruptive, then, because he refuses to go along with a legal process that functions mostly like a machine, rubber-stamping the execution of a poor, possibly innocent, Puerto Rican youth. The judge's indifference, the public defender's incompetence, the general attitude of deference to legal professionals on the part of the jury, all must be confronted for justice to prevail. Chakravarti's book aims to provide the tools for just such an intervention, turning this time not to the angry testimony of witnesses but to the cultivation of critical thinking and practical wisdom by citizen-jurors to exercise a judgment "that goes beyond obedience and rule-following" (3). This concept is what Chakravarti calls radical enfranchisement. Introduced both as "a set of skills and topics jurors should be familiar with through civic education before a trial," and as "an orientation toward citizenship relevant for political...

The Enfranchised Jury

This is a Book Review of Sonali Chakravarti, Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and in Public Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). The author is a political theorist whose understanding of the American jury depends on a critical reception of Jurgen Habermas's discourse ethics and Tocqueville's traditionalist (and in her view, flawed) appreciation of the jury. She articulates a vision which places the jury outside of our usual understanding of the rule of law as a law of rules. She ends with a number of specific suggested reforms, including the end of the Allen charge, an explicit instruction on nullification, and informing the jury of the sentencing consequences of a guilty verdict.

The CSI Effect and the impact of DNA evidence on mock jurors and jury deliberations

ABSTRACT The present research examined the CSI Effect and the impact of DNA evidence on mock jurors and jury deliberations using a 3 (Crime Drama Viewing: low, moderate, high) × 3 (Evidence: DNA innocent, DNA guilty, no DNA control) design. A sample of 178 jury-eligible college students read a case of breaking and entering. Pre-deliberation, some support for a CSI Effect was found with high viewers’ extent of guilt ratings significantly lower than moderate and low viewers’ in the no DNA control and the DNA innocent conditions. This effect was not present for verdicts. Contrary to a CSI Effect, crime drama viewing was not related to guilt judgments with incriminating DNA evidence. A content analysis of comments made during deliberations found little support for the CSI Effect entering the jury room. Specifically, CSI Effect predictions were not supported when examining the discussion of DNA evidence, expressing DNA opinions, or mentioning missing evidence. Overall, the limited CSI Effect found for individuals was attenuated during deliberation. The alarm raised over a possible CSI Effect influencing jury decision making may be unwarranted.

Correction: Legal Consciousness in Action: Lay People and Accountability in the Jury Room

The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes in Excerpts 6 and 8 in terms of text alignment. These mistakes were not present in the proofs provided to the author and were introduced during the final stages of article production.

Legal Consciousness in Action: Lay People and Accountability in the Jury Room

This paper argues that lay people’s legal consciousness, defined as how they experience and interpret the law and legal meanings, can be studied by observing natural conversation. It proposes a framework that analyzes the contexts when law is invoked to account for social behavior, which enables examination of individuals’ perceptions of law through their utilization of and reactions to it. This framework is applied to recordings of a jury deliberation, an ideal setting due to its institutionally-controlled conditions. The analysis demonstrates that jurors wield law as a conversational resource to create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate conduct based upon their endogenous understandings of these boundaries. The invocation of law is an important element of the deliberation because it permits jurors to enforce these distinctions and understand their completed duties as aligning with the legal system’s ideals. This paper also discusses the ability of this framework to study the law’s influence in other social institutions, as well as those institutions’ own “consciousness.”

INVITED ESSAY: Jury Decision Making: Is the Devil in the Details? Observations of a Criminal Justice Professor from Inside the Jury Room

INVITED ESSAY: Jury Decision Making: Is the Devil in the Details? Observations of a Criminal Justice Professor from Inside the Jury Room

Changing the International Justice Landscape: Perspectives on Deaf Citizenship and Jury Service

In Australia and other countries with adversarial court systems, such as Ireland and the United Kingdom, deaf people have not typically been permitted to serve as jurors because of a prohibition against having a sign language interpreter in the jury room. The United States is one country where there is an exception in that deaf people frequently serve as jurors in several states. We know that deaf people can understand courtroom discourse via sign language interpreters, but there has been no evidence as to how deaf people can participate in the jury deliberation process, or the impact of having a sign language interpreter present as “stranger” in the jury room. This had never been tested until this study, funded by the Australian Research [End Page 240] Council Linkage Program scheme, which is the first of its kind internationally to investigate whether deaf people can realistically participate as a juror in a trial and in the jury deliberation process. The project took the form of a simulated mock trial in a district court in Sydney with: a real jury; real police informants; current practicing lawyers; and a recently retired judge of the court. The results of this project will demonstrate whether the prohibition of a stranger (i.e., a sign language interpreter) in the jury room should be overturned. It will also explore the extent to which a deaf person can participate in jury deliberations via sign language interpretation, and how this study will pioneer domestic and international law reform. This article will: briefly track the prior research that led to this study and the current case law affecting the area; share the results of interviews with mock-trial participants and the stakeholder focus groups on their perspectives on the feasibility of deaf people serving as jurors; and present recommendations for the inclusion of deaf people as jurors.

Justice is blind as long as it isn’t deaf: excluding deaf people from jury duty – an Australian human rights breach

ABSTRACTIn the wake of a recent decision by the High Court of Australia, currently a deaf person, who relies on sign language, is not able to serve as a juror because Australian law does not permit the swearing in of an interpreter as the ‘13th person’ in the jury room. In 2016, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities found that Australia is in breach of its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and indicated that legislative and policy change is both mandated and feasible. Four pieces of research conducted over the last decade in Australia have proved that deaf people have the ability to understand complex legal discourse in a courtroom setting using sign language interpretation and, therefore, are able to discharge the functions of juror. The latest research, funded by the Australian Research Council, has highlighted some residual procedural and logistical issues, alongside reservations from some legal stakeholders involved in the project. However, this article argues that these can be addressed, and what is now required is the motivation to address this breach of human rights that treats deaf people differently to hearing people.

From Peer to Obscurity: Julius Moessel and the Fall of an Artistic Reputation

IN DECEMBER OF 2005, an Indiana reporter broke the story of four i940S-era paintings by a Chicago artist named Julius Moessel that had gone missing from the Michigan City, Indiana Library art collection over the years. The library's director, in the process of selling off the institutions art holdings, was less than heartbroken. I didn't care for Moessel, he told a reporter. I didn't think he was that great and his paintings weren't worth much. Three to five hundred dollars each, he guessed, perhaps $1500 total. Compared to what our overall collection grossed . . . that's nothing.1 The library did not file a police report or make an insurance claim; no one knows exactly when the paintings disappeared, and the director doubted their value would reach the insurance policy deductible.Although the disappearance of the paintings may say little for the Michigan City Library's stewardship of its collections, the director's attitude is a fair indication of Julius Moessel's reputation-if you can call it that-today. He is all but unknown outside of his long-time hometown of Chicago, and even there he is a largely forgotten figure. But this was not always the case. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Moessel's work was regularly displayed in local galleries, at the Art Institute of Chicago, in exhibitions sponsored by the anti-modernist Society for Sanity in Art as well as the rebellious No-Jury Society, and at extravaganzas like the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition and the 1936 International Horticulture Exposition. From the late twenties through the mid-fifties, he exhibited in more than 60 one-man shows or group exhibits, mostly in Chicago, but also at New York's Studio Guild, the Corcoran Gallery in D.C., the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Detroit Institute of Art, and other cities. And for most of those years, Chicago's two leading art critics- bitter opponents on most aesthetic matters-celebrated Moessel as one of Chicago's most important artists, and without question its standout muralist.Such acclaim was nothing new. Julius Moessel arrived from Germany in the late 1920s with an established reputation as a successful muralist and of architectural decoration. The Chicago years constituted a second career and a different artistic direction, a turn from large building commissions to gallery-bound easel paintings. Still, despite a robust exhibition record and staunch critical champions during more than a quarter-century of activity, today Moessel is barely known even among historians of Chicago art, and to those vaguely aware of the name, he is dismissed as a minor figure. How does such a critical reputation fade, and how did the history of Chicago art leave Moessel behind? Not surprisingly, the reasons are multiple and intertwined, but they are all ultimately rooted in the politics and commerce of the art world in the 1930s and 1940s, in Chicago and beyond. Teasing out these threads will not only explain why Moessel's once bright reputation dimmed, but also provide broader insights into the mechanics and ideologies of inclusion in and exclusion from the roster of who counts and who doesn't in postwar Chicago art. Before pursuing that analysis, however, it will be useful to sketch the artist's career, and document just how substantial his reputation really was.From Walls to EaselsA 100% mural painter is how Julius Moessel described himself in a 1935 autobiographical sketch, and that's how he spent the first three decades of his career.2 Born in 1871 in Furth, Bavaria, the artist studied at the Munich Academy under Rudolph von Seitz, a well-known decorative and illustrator. Moessel achieved success as a muralist and of architectural decoration while still in his twenties, and by the early 1900s had established a reputation as one of Germany's most important architectural painters, with his work in demand by leading German architects. His best-known projects were government buildings and theaters, including City Halls at Leipzig, Duisburg, and Nurnberg, and the Jury Room in Nurnbergs Central Justice Building (site of the 1940s war crimes trials), as well as several officers' clubs on military bases. …

Klansmen, Communists, and Civil Liberties in Dallas, 1931

Klansmen, Communists, and Civil Liberties in Dallas, 1931 Dick J. Reavis (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Texas Communists Charles J. Coder and Lewis Hurst. Dallas Times-Herald, March 16, 1931. [End Page 254] About 8:20 p.m. on the night of Wednesday, March 4, 1931, three Dallas men—an attorney and two Communist clients—were kidnapped at gunpoint as they emerged from the Dallas jail, located in the city hall. Even though their abductors, fourteen men in four cars, wore neither robes nor hoods, they were presumed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. The controversies that ensued over the next few weeks provide a good example of how racism in the Jim Crow era helped blind many white Dallasites to gross violations of civil liberties. The abduction was far from a perfect crime. Because it was staged on the steps of the jail and coincided with the unannounced release of the Reds, police complicity was suspected. And in taking attorney George Clifton Edwards the kidnappers snatched a man whose disappearance was bound to be noteworthy. Edwards, then in his mid-fifties, was as much a pillar of his community as any man of his opinions could have been. Most civic leaders knew his background because they read about him in newspapers two or three times a year. He had grown up in Dallas, the son of a prominent attorney, earned a master’s degree from Harvard, studied for the Episcopal ministry, then changed his mind and dedicated himself to teaching. He founded a night school for textile workers in South Dallas, taught Latin and algebra in the public schools, served as both a football coach and a debate coach, and became the principal of Oak Cliff High School. In 1906 he had been the gubernatorial candidate of the Socialist Party, and a year later he was elected to the commission that wrote the Dallas city charter.1 [End Page 255] After that, Edwards became a lawyer. He made his debut as a criminal-courts barrister in a trial that went badly awry on March 3, 1910. Edwards had been appointed to defend Allen Brooks, an elderly and demented African American who a week earlier had been accused of raping a three-year-old white girl. As Edwards was interviewing his client in a vacant jury room on the second floor of the county courthouse, some 500 men from a crowd outside stormed past sheriff’s officers, broke into the jury room, put a rope around the defendant’s neck, and pushed him out of a window. Brooks landed on his head, eyewitnesses reported, “with a thud that could be heard above the shouting of the mob.” The crowd then dragged him several blocks to a telephone pole near the Elks’ Arch, which stood on Akard Street, where someone hoisted his corpse for all to behold.2 In later reminiscences about the affair, Edwards observed that “the Court House is directly across the street from the Sheriff’s office, and the ‘Elks’ Arch’ less than a block from the then Dallas Police headquarters. The sheriff’s office and the police could not have been unaware of the whole business but not one officer did one thing.” His conclusion no doubt colored his handling of the 1931 abduction.3 Not without misgivings, Edwards had undertaken the defense of the two Reds only days before. “I am not a Communist. I regard the Communists as a misguided and ignorant and almost foolish set of doctrinaires,” he said at the time.4 His clients were not natives of Dallas or men of any distinction. Although both, like him, were white, they were newcomers who in a month’s time had become infamous as troublemakers. We cannot be sure who they were. In those days, before most Americans drove cars, before the Social Security system, and before the national security state, people could assume identities almost as easily as they could adopt dogs. By the thousands, immigrants had assumed Anglicized names—and sometimes, entirely new names—and members of the Communist Party, especially those who were on the organization’s payrolls in the South, frequently adopted...

Digital Evidence in the Jury Room: The Impact of Mobile Technology on the Jury

Wireless technology and mobile devices are transforming the way courts administer justice, with the increasing use of smartphones, iPads and other tablets by practitioners, judges and juries. In the jury room, mobile devices have the potential to simplify the provision and use of information and facilitate more efficient deliberations and overall decision-making. But before such technology can become commonplace in the jury room, courts would benefit from empirical evidence of the impact — positive and/or negative — of providing it to jurors both in terms of efficiency and preserving the fundamental prerequisites of the right of the accused to a fair trial. This article presents the preliminary findings of a project undertaken to examine the impact of tablets on the deliberation process and jury decisions.

‘Telling tales’: exploring narratives of life and law within the (mock) jury room

Based on a findings of a simulation study in which 160 members of the public observed a mini rape trial re-enactment and were then asked to deliberate in jury groups towards a unanimous verdict, this paper explores the extent to which participants were able, and willing, to understand and apply judicial directions, and the legal tests or criteria contained therein. More specifically, it reflects on whether the additional provision of written directions in the jury room influenced the tone or direction of jurors' discussions, and illustrates the limited recourse made by participants to their contents, as well as their tendency to misinterpret or misapply them when they were relied upon. Having done so, this paper moves on to explore the reasons behind this limited impact, suggesting that fundamental tensions may exist between legal and lay imaginaries, such that jurors are reluctant to jettison their more natural inclinations to reach individual and collective verdicts on the basis of narrative constructions grounded in ‘common sense’ and ‘personal experience’.

Lift: Love is Flower the dir. by Jeff Chen (review)

Reviewed by: Lift: Love is Flower thedir. by Jeff Chen Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco LIFT: LOVE IS FLOWER THE. Conception and direction by Jeff Chen in collaboration with Jean Ng, Loo Zihan, Noorlinah Mohamed, Nora Samosir, and Peter Sau. Additional texts by Robin Loon. TheatreWorks, Singapore. 17–2109 2013. When I arrived in Singapore in 2010, campaigns about kindness were posted over the island’s transport systems. The campaign was to prove to the world that Singapore society is a pleasant and a “happy” one. In 2012, a mobile telephone advertisement was flashed on television screens and movie houses with the slogan “Happy Everywhere,” criticizing the stereotype of Singapore society as being unhappy and apathetic. According to Oliver Chong, the assistant vice president of brand and marketing communications of the phone company, the advertisement was spurred because Singapore ranked as the most emotionless society in the world. Chong added that the campaign would proclaim to the world that as Singaporeans, “We can [each] be an ambassador of happiness to show the world the happy side of Singapore” (Jariel 2013). A similar project is the Happiness Revolution (THR), organized by Singaporean youths (undergraduate students of the Nanyang Technological University in 2012), with a working mantra: “Happy youths make for a healthier and more empowered society” (The Happiness Revolution n.d.). On 7 September 2013, TheatreWorks organized The Happiness Event, performed by eighty performers at the Supertree Grove of Gardens by the Bay. The performance-event presented thirteen short performances “Marking, reflecting and celebrating ‘happiness’ in many forms, ways and moments” [End Page 319](Noorlinah 2013). This performance was based on improvisations—mostly expressions in songs and dances inspired by performers’ discussions uploaded to a Facebook site created for the event. This performance-event was a “kind of teaser to a main event” (Martin 2013): LIFT: Love Is Flower The( LIFT), a performance conceived and directed by Jeff Chen on 17–21 September 2013. LIFTwas Jeff Chen’s return to the Singapore stage after ten years. My colleagues mentioned that my Singapore theatre experience would not be complete without a chance to see a performance conceptualized by Chen. My only prior knowledge of his works is based on reviews in which his productions were thematically scrutinized as radical, such as his adaptation of August Strindberg’s A Dream Playbilled as Asian Boys Volume 1(2000), considered a “milestone in the short history of Singapore gay theatre” (Koh 2000). Chen’s productions as the resident director of Singapore’s Necessary Stage are described as “risky, controversial, irreverent and difficult” (Martin 2013). A 2006 recipient of the Lee Foundation Study Grant and St. Edmund’s College Commonwealth Trust Grant to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, Chen was Singapore theatre’s “enfant terrible” of the 1990s for his avant-garde directions. With support from the Lee Foundation, the Kuo Pao Kun Foundation, the National Arts Council of Singapore, and the Arts Fund, LIFT, in my view, participates in and deconstructs the happiness bandwagon of Singapore. The program indicates that LIFT“began with the concept of happiness which led to questions such as: What is happiness? Do you believe in the pursuit of happiness? Can happiness be pursued or found? Is it sustainable? Fleeting? Momentary? Short-lived?” These are questions posed by Jeff Chen and Noorlinah Mohamed in the LIFTprogram for TheatreWorks. Nevertheless, LIFT’s participation in the happiness advocacy of Singapore is, in my reading, a performance platform to deconstruct popular campaigns about happiness—from media ads where models give free hugs, sing while cooking in a hawker stall, or play the ukulele on a campus bus, signifying the happy side of the city-state. Chen and his collaborators are inviting their fellow Singaporeans to reflect on a more pressing issue: a search for “internal” happiness versus the artificial happiness provided by economic stability. The huge set by Wong Chee Wai invites audience members to visualize a corporate meeting room. A large isosceles trapezoid table with chairs is placed at the center, with a big window and door on the left side and cabinets and a door marked “Jury Room” on the right, implying a corporate law...

English language issues for jury service by New Zealanders from migrant and refugee backgrounds

This paper describes an exploratory study carried out to identify the issues for jury service for people with low levels of English language ability. Questions were emailed to English language teachers and providers of support services to New Zealanders from migrant and refugee backgrounds. The experiences reported by respondents related to issues of understanding the New Zealand legal system, responses to jury summons, excusal from jury service, jury selection, and courtroom and jury room language. In addition, the levels of English language ability appropriate for jury service and approaches to assessing this were identified as concerns. Suggestions are made for improvements to the process and framework for jury service.

Conflict in the Jury Room

A number of studies have shown how participants work to accomplish their goals in ways that minimize the possibility of acrimonious conflict. And yet acrimonious conflict does occur. This raises the issue of what circumstances and discursive moves engender acrimonious interactions and what circumstances and discursive moves avert them. We address this issue through the analysis of segments of a jury deliberation in the penalty phase of a murder trial. We followed the lead of writers who have tied the outbreak of an acrimonious interaction to the launching of a complaint that exposes a personal flaw in the target. We examine three cases where one juror made such a complaint about another. In two of those cases, an acrimonious interaction did not ensue, in the third it did. In comparing these cases, we found that much depends on whether the complainant’s wording and sequential placement of the complaint are mitigating or inflammatory, and much depends on whether the target juror resists the complaint in ways that engender acrimony or concedes and avoids engendering it.