Juries

Deaf Jurors

Below is an article about deaf jurors serving in Detroit.  The article raises several interesting points that I had not previously given much thought to.  First, the process of deliberations is different when one of the jurors is deaf (in one example cited in the article the jurors used a number system to keep track of who was speaking).  Also, deaf jurors appear to be more focused on the witnesses body language since they cannot gauge voice inflection.  

7ABC: More and More Deaf Jurors are Serving in Local Courts

Trial Jurors and Variables Influencing Why They Return the Verdicts They Do - A Guide for Practicing and Future Trial Attorneys

Mitch Frank

 

Osvaldo Morera

 

Trial Jurors and Variables Influencing Why They Return the Verdicts They Do - A Guide for Practicing and Future Trial Attorneys

Abstract:     

This is the third of a trilogy of articles based on a 204-question survey of jurors. The first focused on whether jurors in criminal cases were upholding the presumption of innocence and the right of a defendant not to testify. The second examined jurors' evaluations of their advocates' performance. This article focuses on the relationship between pertinent variables in the survey and the verdicts returned. After the Introduction in Part I, Part II provides the methodology and organization of the survey, including how the statistical analyses were performed. The results of these analyses are reported beginning in Part III with how jurors' demographics bear on their verdicts, and Part IV analyzes the attorneys’ demographics.

Part V examines the effects of the jurors' trial attorneys' understanding (or misunderstanding) of the strengths and weaknesses of their cases; their honesty or lack thereof; their asking questions that were important in deciding the case; their strength of personality; and their being perceived by the jurors to be either public defenders or private counsel. Part VI examines the effect of how jurors rated the likeability and ability of their trial attorneys. In Part VII, the article looks at how the trial lawyers' use of exhibits may have played a role in the verdicts they received. In Part VIII, the analyses turn to demographics of the parties. Part IX examines credibility of the parties-specifically whether the jurors liked them or felt sympathy for them, and, in civil cases, whether blaming someone else for what had transpired produced an effect on the verdicts.

 

Part X is exclusively devoted to criminal cases, particularly the effect of the credibility of a defendant who testified, whether jurors presumed the defendant innocent, and whether it would have been better if he or she had not testified. Part XI examines the length of deliberations. Part XII is also devoted to criminal cases, and includes a logistic regression to determine predictors of guilt or innocence using multiple variables. The article concludes with Part XIII, and is followed by a statistical appendix.

Defending the Jury: Crime, Community, and the Constitution

New Book by Laura Appleman

Defending the Jury: Crime, Community, and the Constitution

Abstract:      

This book sets forth a new approach to twenty-first-century criminal justice and punishment, an approach that fully involves the community and provides a better way to make our criminal process more transparent and inclusive. The American criminal justice system faces numerous challenges because of its ongoing failure to integrate the community’s voice. Using the lens of the Sixth Amendment jury trial right, this book offers fresh and much-needed ways for incorporating the citizenry into the procedures of criminal justice, resulting in greater investment and satisfaction in the system. Ultimately, the people’s right to participate in the criminal justice system through the criminal jury – a right that is all too often overlooked – is essential to truly legitimizing the criminal process and ensuring its democratic nature.

The American Jury System: A Synthetic Overview

Richard Lempert

 

The American Jury System: A Synthetic Overview 

Abstract:      

This essay, originally written for a Swiss volume, and revised with added material for publication in the Chicago Kent Law Review, is intended to provide in brief compass a review of much that is known about the American jury system, including the jury's historical origins, its political role, controversies over its role and structure, its performance, both absolutely and in comparison to judges and mixed tribunals, and proposals for improving the jury system. The essay is informed throughout by 50 years of research on the jury system, beginning with the 1965 publication of Kalven and Zeisel's seminal book, The American Jury. The political importance of the jury is seen to lie more in the jury's status as a one shot decision maker largely independent of trial court bureaucracies than in its ability to nullify the law. Despite flaws in the jury process and room for improvement, the message that emerges from the literature is that juries take their job seriously and for the most part perform well. There is little reason to believe that replacing jury trials with bench trials or mixed tribunals would improve the quality of American justice, and some reason to think it might harm it.

Forensic Oratory and the Jury Trial in Nineteenth-Century America

Simon Stern

 

Forensic Oratory and the Jury Trial in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract:      

The institution of the jury underwent radical change in the United States during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, the jury trial was a form of popular amusement, rivaling the theater and often likened to it.The jury’s ability to find law, as well as facts, was widely if inconsistently defended. The trial’s role as a source of entertainment, and the jury’s ability to nullify, were consistent with a view of forensic oratory that emphasized histrionics, declamation, and emotionally charged rhetoric as means of legal persuasion. By the end of the century, judges had gained more control of the law-finding power, and various questions of fact had been transformed into questions of law. Many of the details that would have aided the lawyers’ dramatic efforts were screened out by a host of new exclusionary rules. The overall effect was to afford less scope for lawyers' emotional excesses — and to make those performances seem disreputable and outmoded. As an institution, the trial continued to figure significantly in American culture through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Numerous factors conspired to weaken the trial’s prominence after that time. Although these changes in forensic style have not usually been considered as a part of that narrative, they may have helped to facilitate the decline of the trial, by reorienting its function away from a broadly representative one, and towards one that emphasized dispassionate analysis in the service of objectivity and technical exactitude, appealing to a rather different community, made up of professional lawyers and those laypersons who could appreciate their values.

The Schizophrenic Jury and Other Palladia of Liberty: A Critical Historical Analysis

Markus Dubber

The Schizophrenic Jury and Other Palladia of Liberty: A Critical Historical Analysis

Abstract:      

The jury’s history is interestingly schizophrenic, even paradoxical. On one side is the history of the jury as palladium of liberty, often along with other such palladia, notably habeas corpus. On the other is the history of the jury as instrument of oppression. On one side is the jury as English, local, indigenous, democratic; on the other is the jury as French, central, foreign, autocratic. This paper reflects on this paradox, regarding it as neither sui generis nor in need of resolution. Instead, it critically analyzes the jury’s schizophrenic history from the perspective of New Historical Jurisprudence, as an illustration of the fundamental tension between two modes of governance, law and police, which ultimately are rooted in the distinction between autonomy and heteronomy that has shaped the conception and practice of government since classical Athens.

McVeigh Juror Recounts Experience

Although I am hesitant to draw any direct correlation between the McVeigh and Tsarnaev trials, I nevertheless think it is interesting to read about a juror's experience on a high-profile capital case.

Marshall Project: Juror No. 5

What You Bring to the Courthouse: The Interaction between Racial Context and Jury Awards

Matthew Reid Krell

What You Bring to the Courthouse: The Interaction between Racial Context and Jury Awards

Abstract:      

Despite the hurdles required to overcome selection effects in analyzing trial results, scholars have studied the effect of judicial ideology and juror race on verdicts. But these variables have never been interacted. Using a two-part selection model and a new dataset of federal civil jury verdicts, this article finds selection effects driven by contingent-fee plaintiff’s attorneys, no effect on verdicts for judicial ideology, and a curvilinear effect of the size of the black population on verdicts.

Juror's Tweets Not Enough to Overturn Guilty Verdict

A judge recently held that a juror's inappropriate tweets during trial were not sufficient grounds to overturn a defendant's criminal conviction for murder. The key point for the judge is that the juror did not tweet about facts in the case.  However, the juror did tweet from the jury box and send tweets such as: 

In my book, everybody’s guilty until proven innocent.

It will be interesting to see whether this ruling will be upheld on appeal.

Fairfield Daily Republic: Judge: Juror's Twitter messages during trial not prejudicial

Expedited Trial Programs

Robert Patterson

Reviving the Civil Jury Trial: Implementing Short, Summary, and Expedited Trial Programs

Abstract:      

Civil jury trials are disappearing. In all courts, both state and federal, there is a decline in both the percentage of cases that go to trial and the absolute number of trials — all while the number of claims is greater than ever before. The civil jury trial is losing its place in America’s justice system, with unfortunate consequences: “The decline in jury trials has meant fewer cases that have the benefit of citizen input, fewer case precedents, fewer jurors who understand the system, fewer judges and lawyers who can try jury cases — and overall, a smudge on the Constitutional promise of access to civil . . . jury trials.” However, despite the many factors contributing to the decline, there may be a way to invigorate the civil jury trial and restore its vital place in America’s justice system. This Comment proposes the adoption of short, summary, and expedited (SSE) civil jury trial programs in response to the decline of the civil jury trial. These trial programs are a faster and cheaper alternative to the traditional jury trial that still retains many of a traditional trial’s key attributes and benefits. An SSE trial program encourages the use of a jury, shortens the time between initiating the lawsuit and a trial, reduces the overall cost of litigation to all parties, and allows attorneys and judges to gain needed experience — without burdening the already existing civil justice system or violating the constitutional promise of jury trials. Unfortunately, few jurisdictions have implemented these programs, and fewer still have done so in a way that supports the traditional jury trial instead of adding yet another way of avoiding it. Scholarship to date on the topic has yet to provide a complete model of an SSE trial program that has the possibility of reviving the jury trial. This Comment remedies this by proposing a model SSE trial program that incorporates the attributes necessary to help revive the civil jury trial.