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.