Unanimous Verdict Research Articles

The Body, Sexuality, and Self-Defense in State vs. Joan Little, 1974-1975

I ran because it was self-defense. ... [I]f authorities there [in Beaufort County] had gotten to me before any other body, ... I never would have been here to tell what really happened. Joan (September 1974) (1) Sometimes one has to become differently reliable than one has been. ... Sometimes people and possibilities just change; lives are regularly reordered by complex synergies of choice and chance. ... Whether or not there is damage to reckon, reestablishment of reliability after changes in course--not staying in formation but being again reliably responsible from here--may fairly be described as integrity. Margaret Urban Walker (1997) (2) When murder trial, State of North Carolina vs. Joan Little, began on 14 July 1975, it had already become one of nation's most publicized in a decade of highly publicized trials such as ones of Angela Davis, those surrounding prison uprising at Attica, New York, and those of the Wilmington 10, the Charlotte 3, and Inez Garcia. (3) level of pre-trial publicity for State vs. Joan Little, strategy of her attorneys, media, and Free Joan Little Movement combined to require a public statement in courtroom prior to selection of first juror. The defendant is entitled to have her case tried in calmness of a courtroom and not as a spectacle in an arena, presiding judge Hamilton H. Hobgood announced in his opening statement. (4) Yet with all of his carefully prepared rules for news media, his specific attention to judicial procedures, and his insistence upon proper courtroom decorum, State vs. Joan Little, and Free Joan Little Movement surrounding it, became a strange amalgam of spectacle, stringent procedures, extra-judicial statements, and nation-wide demonstrations. (5) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For four weeks between 14 July and 15 August 1975 inside Wake County Courthouse, attorneys for Joan implemented a skillful strategic defense, while defendant faced her accusers, heard witnesses, and gave testimony on her own behalf. A section of courtroom was reserved for more than one hundred representatives of media from around world. One journalist-lawyer dutifully attended everyday taking careful notes in preparation for a book on State vs. Joan Little. Little's defense team included not only talented lawyers, but also a jury selection expert and a psychic. Outside courthouse, a diverse group of demonstrators daily gathered to show support for Little. They were as aware as defense team of a necessary relationship between a visible, vocal social movement and outcome of trial. Celebrities such as Angela Davis, Julian Bond, and William Kunstler made appearances on different days of trial. Judge Hobgood received daily stacks of mail--typed, handwritten, and scrawled--supporting or denouncing Joan Little. (6) Little, her attorneys, and supporters fought to ensure that be spared execution in gas chamber. Little, an inmate in Beaufort County jail awaiting appeal of a breaking and entering conviction, had been indicted for first-degree murder for killing county jailer, Clarence Alligood. Claiming self-defense, insisted under oath that Alligood had sexually assaulted her in jail on 27 August 1974. On 15 August 1975, what had been hailed as Biggest Civil Rights Trial of [the] '70s, ended with announcement of a unanimous verdict. A jury of six African Americans and six whites, both male and female, acquitted Joan of all charges. (7) This essay is concerned with Joan Little's self-defense and historical significance of State vs. Joan as instrument by which she, her attorneys, and her supporters challenged a dominant narrative in U.S. history concerning African American women, their rights, and their moral/ethical identity. was offered opportunity to leave United States and escape legal proceedings in death of jailer. …

The Elimination of Hung Juries: Retrials and Nonunanimous Verdicts

Relaxing the unanimity requirement for verdicts in a given criminal trial leads to fewer hung juries and more verdicts of all four types: correct and wrongful convictions, and correct and wrongful acquittals. A criminal proceeding, however, does not necessarily end when a jury hangs. We demonstrate that if retrials occur until a verdict is reached, a unanimous verdict rule is generally more accurate than a nonunanimous rule with respect to the probabilities of all four types of verdicts. Thus, a tradeoff between hung jury costs and verdict accuracy exists when considering unanimous versus nonunanimous verdict rules.

Imagining Mary Dean

Leon Edel expressed the central puzzle of writing biography as "every life takes its own form and a biographer must find the ideal and unique literary form that will express it" (qtd. in Novarr 165). My primary challenge in writing Poisoned: The Trials of Mary Dean – a biography in the form of a (fictionalised) first-person memoir purportedly written by the subject herself – was the location of a textual voice for Mary that, if not her own, could have credibly belonged to a woman of her time, place and circumstance. 2The 'Dean case' caused a sensation across Australia in the mid-1890s when George Dean was arrested for the attempted murder of his 20-year-old wife, Mary. George was a handsome Sydney ferry master who had played the romantic lead in a series of spectacular rescues, flinging himself into the harbour to save women passengers who had fallen overboard. When on trial for repeatedly poisoning his wife, his actions and motivations were not probed; instead, Mary's character and behaviour and, by extrapolation, those of the entire female sex, were examined and analysed. This approach climaxed in defence counsel claims that Mary poisoned herself to frame her husband, but George was found guilty and sentenced to hang, the mandatory punishment for attempted murder at that time.

Nogmaals: het grafschrift van Jakobus, de broervan Jezus

This article surveys the past year’s debate over the James ossuary. It argues that the report of the Israel Antiquities Authority (with its unanimous verdict of non-authenticity of the inscription) is deeply flawed and sketches the background of it. Without claiming authenticity for the inscription, the author argues that as yet no compelling reason has been put forward to reject it as a fake.

False Start for the PhD in Australia

When the PhD was introduced in England, consideration was also being given to its introduction in Australia. The University of Melbourne first discussed the idea in 1918, and again in 1924, but other Australian universities were opposed. Arguments ran along lines familiar in England — some foresaw the PhD competing with other doctoral degrees, and others saw difficulties in providing resources. Others wished to continue the system whereby Australian graduates went to Britain for research training. Faced with a unanimous verdict by its sister institutions, Melbourne withdrew its proposal, and the idea of the PhD went underground, not to surface again until 1944 when Melbourne again led the way, this time successfully, in its introduction.

Specificity and Juror Agreement in Civil Cases

Imagine a product liability case in which the plaintiff has advanced evidence supporting two kinds of product defects: a manufacturing defect and a design defect. Six jurors believe a manufacturing defect has been proven by a preponderance of the evidence, but do not believe the design defect has been proven. The other six jurors believe that only the design defect has been sufficiently proven. If each juror were to vote solely on the existence of any product defect, the jury would return a unanimous verdict for the plaintiff. Given a general verdict format, jurors probably will return a verdict for the plaintiff, unless they question whether their disagreement on the specifics invalidates that verdict. Given a specific verdict format asking separately about the design and manufacturing defects, the jurors will probably return a verdict for the defendant, unless, given that they all agree that the plaintiff should recover, they collude to show some agreement where none existed. Thus, whether a specific or general verdict form is submitted probably makes a difference in the verdict rendered. Even more troubling is the fact that the basic question arising from this situation has not been addressed by the presiding judge: Must the jurors specifically agree on which product defect existed? Although this scenario seems likely to occur in product liability cases, the question of specificity in a jury's agreement is not limited to such cases. The problem can potentially arise in any case in which the plaintiff alleges multiple sets of facts that would allow her to recover from the defendant.! For example, a plaintiff could allege that the defendant committed various negligent acts, where proof of any one of the acts alleged would allow her to recover.2 This Comment focuses on

In Defense of Unanimous Jury Verdicts: Mistrials, Communication, and Strategic Voting

The requirement of unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials is widely believed to reduce the likelihood of convicting the innocent. This belief depends largely upon the assumption that jurors will vote nonstrategically based on their impression of the trial evidence. Recent literature, however, has questioned this assumption, and Feddersen and Pesendorfer propose a model in which it is never a Nash equilibrium for jurors to vote nonstrategically under unanimity rule, and equilibrium behavior produces higher probabilities of both convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty under unanimity rule than under numerous alternatives. I extend this work by incorporating two additional features of actual jury procedure: the possibility of mistrial and communication among jurors. Under each circumstance, I demonstrate that nonstrategic voting is a Nash equilibrium under fairly general conditions and that unanimity performs better than any alternative rule in minimizing probability of trial error and maximizing expected utility.

Effects of reasonable doubt definition and inclusion of a lesser charge on jury verdicts.

The impact of two procedural factors on jury verdicts was assessed in a mock jury study: (1) definition of the term “reasonable doubt” and (2) inclusion of a “lesser” charge against the defendant in addition to a primary charge. Mock juries of 4-7 persons read an edited transcript from a real murder trial and deliberated to a unanimous verdict. Juries with the option to convict on a lesser charge produced more overall convictions than juries receiving only the primary charge, but only when “reasonable doubt” was undefined. Conversely, more murderconvictions resulted when the reasonable doubt criterion was defined in relation to being “firmly convinced” of the defendant's guilt. Parallel analyses of the effects of these two procedural factors on individual juror predeliberation verdict preferences differed in several important ways, highlighting the need for group-level research on juries. Implications, limitations, and a preliminary integrated model of jury decision making are discussed.

Genentech, UC end patent standoff

The University of California has accepted an offer of $200 million from South San Francisco-based biotech giant Genentech to settle a potentially costly patent-infringement lawsuit. The university originally sued Genentech in 1990, claiming the company illegally used UC-patented human growth hormone DNA information in developing Genentech's highly successful growth drug Protropin. The drug is used to treat growth hormone deficiency in children. During a high-profile trial that began last April, a jury was told that on New Year's Eve 1978, Peter H. Seeburg, then a researcher at Genentech, stole the genetic material from his old lab at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The suit alleged that Genentech then used the material in such a way as to infringe on UC's patent. A jury voted 8 to 1 in favor of the university last June, falling just short of the unanimous verdict required for a conviction. Facing a potentially lengthy and expensive retrial that ...

Genentech jury deadlocks on patent suit

A nine-member federal jury deadlocked last week on whether to convict pioneering biotechnology firm Genentech of infringing a University of California patent for human growth hormone DNA. After more than a week of deliberation, the jury voted 8 to 1 in favor of the university—a unanimous verdict was needed to convict. The suit alleged that 20 years ago, Genentech stole genetic material from UC San Francisco labs and used it to develop its successful drug Protropin, which treats human growth hormone deficiency in children. A conviction conceivably could have cost Genentech up to $1.2 billion, nearly seven times its profit in 1998. The jury did reject Genentech's claim that the UC human growth hormone DNA patent was In a statement, James E. Hoist, the University of California's general counsel and vice president for legal affairs, said: We are gratified that the jury rejected the claim that the...patent for human growth hormone is invalid. Hoist ...

Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting

It is often suggested that requiring juries to reach a unanimous verdict reduces the probability of convicting an innocent defendant while increasing the probability of acquitting a guilty defendant. We construct a model that demonstrates how strategic voting by jurors undermines this basic intuition. We show that the unanimity rule may lead to a high probability of both kinds of error and that the probability of convicting an innocent defendant may actually increase with the size of the jury. Finally, we demonstrate that a wide variety of voting rules, including simple majority rule, lead to much lower probabilities of both kinds of error.

The effects of juror anonymity on jury verdicts.

This study examined the effects of anonymity on jurors' verdicts and on jurors' feelings of accountability for their jury's verdicts. Twenty four-person anonymous juries and 20 four-person nonanonymous juries rendered individual and group verdicts for three student defendants charged with selling drugs on a school campus. When unanimous guilty verdicts were reached, juries imposed one of five punishments. Finally, jurors completed postdeliberation opinion and accountability questionnaires. As predicted, anonymous juries showed a higher rate of conviction (70%) than did nonanonymous juries (40%) when the evidence against the defendant was strong, supporting the hypothesis that anonymity would have a greater effect for situations in which there was relatively strong evidence of the defendant's guilt. Anonymous juries imposed the harshest punishment (expulsion) significantly more often than did nonanonymous juries. Contrary to predictions from differential self-awareness theory, anonymous juries did not report feeling less accountable than did nonanonymous juries. However, anonymous juries did see the process as significantly more fair than did identifiable juries.

Ethnicity of Defendants and Jurors as Influences on Jury Decisions1

To assess the influence of ethnicity on jury decisions, 480 subjects viewed a videotaped trial of an Anglo or Hispanic defendant. Anglo or Hispanic majority 6‐person juries deliberated until a unanimous verdict was reached. The juries that convicted the defendant were asked to determine sentence length and to provide a probation/ parole recommendation. Anglo majority juries convicted the defendant significantly more (M= 79%) than did the Hispanic majority juries (M= 52%), x2= 5.45, p < 0.02. No main effect of defendant ethnicity was obtained, but there was an interaction between the defendant and the jury's ethnicity, x2= 5.41, p < 0.02. Anglo majority juries were more lenient with the Anglo defendant, but the Hispanic majority juries did not differ in their conviction rates. No significant effects were obtained for sentence length. Differences in probation/parole recommendations were a function of jury ethnicity, F(l, 15) = 4.74, p < 0.05. Anglos were more likely to recommend that the defendant serve the full term of the sentence. These results are interpreted in terms of stereotyping and are discussed regarding their implications for a defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial.

«Katalanisch» oder «Valencianisch»?: zum sprachlichen Sezessionismus im Land València

In 1932, spelling rules for the native language of the Valencian Country were accepted in the Valencian city of Castelló. In fact, this decision meant the acceptance of the rules proposed by Pompeu Fabra for the Catalan language and consequently also the implicit acceptance of the essential identity of Valencian with Catalan. Despite this almost unanimous verdict of all the Valencian cultural forces, attempts at linguistic secessionism that seek to establish Valencian as a literary language independent of Catalan have continued to this day. With the recent electoral successes of a political party (Unió Valenciana) defending this secessionist position, the issue is once again very acute. Against this background, the article re-examines the main claims of secessionists in their academic and philological form, in order to determine the extent to which they can claim to be scientific. It is concluded that none of its central claims have been accepted by the rest of the international scientific community and that the so-called valencianophilia of secessionists often seems to be nothing more than an irrational and ill-concealed catalanophobia whose ultimate goal is la replacement of Catalan in the Valencian Country by Spanish.

The effects of complainant age and expert psychological testimony in a simulated child sexual abuse trial.

Mock jurors viewed a videotape of a simulated child sexual abuse trial and then deliberated to a unanimous verdict. The complainant was described as either a 13- or 17-year-old female child. Jurors voted to convict more often when the younger complainant was seen, and the younger complainant was rated as more credible than the older complainant. Female jurors voted the defendant guilty more often and rated the complainant as being more credible than male jurors. Jurors voted to convict more often and rated the defendant as less credible when expert psychological testimony was specific to the case than when they were presented with either general expert testimony or no expert testimony. Jurors who saw a psychological expert testify became less accepting of child sexual abuse misconceptions than those in the no expert control condition. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Effects of the dynamite charge on the deliberations of deadlocked mock juries.

When juries report that they are deadlocked, judges often deliver the dynamite charge, a supplemental instruction that urges jurors to rethink their views in an effort to reach a unanimous verdict. The present study evaluated the impact of this procedure on 378 subjects who participated in 63 deadlocked mock juries. Results indicated that the dynamite charge caused jurors in the voting minority to feel coerced and change their votes, reduced the pressure felt by those in the majority, and hastened the deliberation process in juries that favored conviction. These findings raise serious questions concerning the use of this controversial charge.

Trial by jury

In French law, the 12 members of a jury are not required to return a unanimous verdict. It was decreed in 1831 that a vote of 8 or more would suffice. Four years later, it was proposed to reduce the requirement to 7 or more. There was a heated discussion in the Chamber of Deputies of this proposal which was strongly challenged by Arago, a mathematical physicist. Despite his ardent use of probability theory, the law was in fact changed.

Intervention Policy under Floating Exchange Rates: An Analysis of the Swiss Case

Empirical analyses of central bank foreign-exchange market intervention are typically cast in terms of a dichotomy between leaning against the wind and targeting. Apparently, the profession has arrived at an almost unanimous verdict in favor of the former. Th is paper challenges the ruling consensus. Econometric estimates are c omputed on the basis of a more flexible intervention response functio n and a new proposal for removing simultaneous-equations bias in the context of intervention analyses. The obtained results suggest that, in situations of conflict, the Swiss National Bank has given priority to exchange-rate targeting over exchange-rate smoothing. Copyright 1987 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Rousseau's General Will and the Problem of Consent

Rousseau's General Will and the Problem of Consent W. T. JONES THERE ARE ALMOST as many views of Rousseau's general will as there are writers on Rousseau. Some hold that what he says about the general will is either truism or else false? Others equate the general will with natural law.~ Others again find in the general will anticipations of Hegel. 3 More, perhaps, agree with recent student of the subject who, holding that formulated the question badly, concludes that he genuinely unable to make up his mind about what constitutes the general will and how it comes to be. ''4 Thus, despite radical differences in interpretation, the nearly unanimous verdict--one might almost say, the general will--on the general will is unfavorable. I believe that Rousseau's critics are themselves partly to blame. For the most part they have anachronistically 5 assumed him to be interested in problems that interest them and have not asked themselves what problem concerned him. No wonder, then, that he appears to them to be confused. The problem that concerned was moral problem--the problem of demonstrating that political organizations can have moral foundation. I am much indebted to Brian Barry, John Benton, Bruce E. Cain, Gary Cox,Alan Donagan, Edward Green, Morgan Kousser, Lee C. McDonald, J. Donald Moon, Roger Noll, Charles R. Plott, Alan Schwartz, and Charles Young for commenting helpfully on an earlier draft of this paper. x For instance, John Plamenatz in Man and Society, 2. vols.(NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 1 : 394. For instance, Franz Haymann in La loi naturelle dans la philosophic politique de J.- J. Rousseau in Annales de la Societ~Jean-Jacque 3~ (1943-45): 96-97. s Among them--alas!--at one time the author of this paper, for instance in his Masters of Political Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, x947), 2:265. 4 Richard Fralin, and Representation (NewYork, 1978), 79, 86-87. 5 For an illuminating discussion of the anachronistic tendencies of many twentieth-century historians of philosophy see Philosophyin History, edited by Richard Rorty,J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1x-14. [105] lo6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY understood that some compulsion is necessary, and he was well aware that most states have actually been founded on, and maintained by, force. The only question was whether compulsion is compatible with morality: was it possible to design political organization in which a man can be free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own (IV, ~: lOl; 440)?6 If freedom and compulsion cannot be reconciled the notion of moral political organization is only vain and chimerical illusion. The phrase is Kant's, not Rousseau's, and Kant of course was discussing the problem of reconciling freedom of the will with Newtonian physics. But the phrase, and even more the thought, would have been congenial to Rousseau. However, whereas Kant's reconciliation of personal morality and physical determinism depends on the obscure metaphysical notion of noumenal causality, 's reconciliation of political morality and political compulsion depends on the notion of general will, and that, as I shall argue, is an empirical concept. If political organizations have such-and-such an organizational structure--this is Rousseau's claim--a general will among the citizens emerges, and they will consent to be compelled. In word, political morality depends on the consent of the citizens, and the consent of the citizens depends on there being general will. That is necessary condition for the existence of political morality. Thus, though the focus of this paper is narrow, the topic is of central importance to Rousseau--and not only to Rousseau. It is of central importance to all those who agree with him that the morality of any political order depends on the consent of those subject to it. But does his concept of general will solve the problem of consent? In this paper I shall argue that Rousseau's claim is largely, though not entirely, warranted. I believe that careful reading of The Social Contract shows that...

Jurors' interpretations and jury decision making.

In arriving at their verdicts, jurors must determine “what really happened” in the case at hand. Their interpretations then guide their decision making and become influential in the group deliberation process. This article uses conversational data from simulated jury deliberations to describe jurors' practice of articulating schematic interpretations as accounts for their verdict choices, and as means for persuading other jurors. As jurors contribute additional interpretations during deliberations, the group decision-making task becomes more complex, deliberations las longer, and they are more difficult to resolve. A significant negative relation is established between the number of interpretations articulated and the jury's likelihood of reaching a unanimous verdict. Articulating multiple interpretations in support of a candidate verdict appears to militate against its unanimous adoption.