Court Phase 2: Court

Question 1

When are Juries used?

Answer 1

Criminal and Civil Trials

Question 2

How many Jurors are there for a criminal trial?

Answer 2

12

Question 3

How many jurors are there for a civil trial?

Answer 3

4

Question 4

How many reserve jurors are permitted?

Answer 4

Between 2 and 6

Question 5

Who are the jurors?

Answer 5

Members of the public between 18 and 70Random selection from the electoral rolls
Some are not eligible for jury service
For example:
Current or ex-police officers
Government officials
People with previous convictions 
Eligibility questionnaire

Question 6

Studies on who is actually on the Juries

Answer 6

In 2001-02, a sample of Queensland District Court Jurors contained:
Persons aged between 18 and 69 years
107 females (56%)
65 jurors had a University education (34%); 38 jurors had some other form of tertiary education (20%)
73 jurors were not in the workforce

Question 7

Exemptions to Jury Duty

Answer 7

Other members of the community who may be excluded from participating as jurors include:

persons of old age, pregnant women, people with child-care responsibilities, people with a medical condition, individuals with prior criminal convictions, individuals who cannot speak English.
Those with professional involvement in the legal system and any number of skilled occupational group members (doctors, school teachers, ministers, senior bureaucrats).

All these exemptions from service make the jury pool less representative

Question 8

Voire Dire Process

Answer 8

The two main goals of Voir dire is to determine
1) whether the potential jurors are qualified to serve as jurors
2) to identify any biases that may interfere with their ability to be impartial
Objection to a juror can be raised by defense or prosecution

Voir dire typically lasts hours but can take months – especially in trials with intense pre-trial publicity (PTP)

It has been argued that there is no aspect of a criminal trial that is more important to the ultimate outcomes than the jury selection process (Lieberman & Sales, 2007).

Question 9

Juries Act

Answer 9

Provincial and territorial legislation that outlines the eligibility criteria for jury service and how prospective jurors must be selected

Question 10

Jury Summons

Answer 10

A court order that states a time and place to go for jury duty

Question 11

Representativeness

Answer 11

A jury composition that represents the community where the crime occurred

Question 12

Impartiality

Answer 12

A characteristic of jurors who are unbiased

Question 13

Impartiality: Centres on what 3 issues?

Answer 13

1) For a juror to be impartial, he or she must set aside any pre-existing bias, prejudice or attitudes and judge the case based solely on the admissible evidence. e.g. Juror must ignore the defendant belongs to an ethnic group against which he or she holds a bias
2) To be impartial also means that the juror must ignore any information that is not part of the admissible evidence. e.g. prior to the start of the trial, a case may have received media attention highlighting facts about the defendant that are biased, irrelevant, or inadmissible
3) It also is important that the juror have no connection to the defendant so that the juror does not view the evidence subjectively or unduly influence the other jurors

Question 14

Challenge for cause

Answer 14

Lawyers make a challenge for cause to the judge that potential juror x is unsuitable for reasons y and the judge makes the decision to excuse or not.
Whether a juror’s particular background or beliefs make them biased and therefore unsuitable for service (Vidmar, 2000).

Question 15

Peremptory Challenges

Answer 15

Gives both the defence and prosecution a specific number of unconditional peremptory challenges
Jurisdictions in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and United States

No justifications (reasons) have to be brought to exclude a specific juror. 
Judges must exclude these jurors.

Generally, defence lawyers exclude jurors who have professions or backgrounds similar to the victim as they may feel an emotional link to them, while prosecutors tend to exclude jurors who may show affinity for the defendant.

Question 16

Change of venue

Answer 16

Moving a trial to a community other than the one in which the crime occurred

Question 17

Adjournment

Answer 17

Delaying the trial until sometime in the future

Question 18

Challenge for cause

Answer 18

An option to reject biased jurors

Question 19

Some methods for increasing the likelihood of an impartial jury

Answer 19

1) The crown or defence may argue that the trial should be moved to another community because it would be very impartial jury from the local community
2) Allowing sufficient time to pass so that the biasing effect of any pretrial prejudicial information has dissipated by the time that the trial has taken place. Thus the judge may call for an adjournment, delaying the trial until sometime in the future
3) The crown or defence may argue hat although the perspective jury pool may be partial, if questioned, these prospective jurors could be identified and rejected from serving on the jury. Jurors can be probed with a set of predetermined questions

Question 20

Jury Nullification (Ignoring the law)

Answer 20

Occurs when a jury ignores the law and the evidence, rendering a verdict based on some other criteria

Question 21

Chaos Theory

Answer 21

The theory that when jurors are guided by their emotions and personal biases rather than by the law, chaos in judgments results

Question 22

Jury Functions

Answer 22

1) To use the wisdom of 12 to reach a verdict
2) To act as a conscience of the community
3) To protect against out-of-date laws
4) To increase knowledge about the justice system

Question 23

Post-Trial Interviews

Answer 23

Post-trial interviews
Assess jurors’ understanding of judges’ instructions
Jurors may not be explicitly aware of what influences them
Issues of reliability of self-report data
Hindsight bias
Social desirability
Recall degrades over time
Post-trial interviews of jurors who served on six criminal trials in New South Wales disclosed that jurors who admitted difficulty understanding DNA expert evidence nevertheless proceeded to convict (Findlay 2008).
High external validity
Can only discuss variables, not cause and effect

Question 24

Archival Research

Answer 24

Records of trials, police interviews with witnesses
Only have the information available
Cannot go back and ask more questions
High external validity but cannot establish cause and effect.

Question 25

Questionnaire surveys

Answer 25

• Kalven and Zeisel (The American Jury) sent a questionnaire to 3500 judges in the US
  15. 8% responded (n = 555) Data on 3576 trials (3% of all jury trials during the two-year sample period) “By and large the jury understand the facts and get the case straight”
• However, they only asked Judges if the jurors had understood the trial content.Kalven and Zeisel also concluded that jurors’ verdicts are not significantly different from judges’ decisions Judges and juries agreed in 76% of verdicts
• However, over half of the cases submitted came from only 15% of judges

Question 26

Simulation

Answer 26

Mock juries
Most use written materials and undergraduates (Bornstein, 1999)
Most do not use deliberation
High internal validity, generally low external validity
Most research based on US system of law
Suggest that both characteristics of the defendant and the jurors impact on decisions

Question 27

Mock Juries

Answer 27

Participants are given the trial information and respond individually (juror research) or in groups (jury research)
Independent variables are often manipulated
race or age of defendant
Admission or exclusion of some piece of evidence or defendant / plaintiff background

Question 28

Field Studies

Answer 28

Needs the courts cooperation which can be difficult
Investigate, for example, differences between jurors that were allowed to take notes and those who were not
High external validity
In The American Jury days, a District Court judge allowed taping of jury deliberations. When it was made public; resulted in law banning recording of jury deliberations.

Question 29

Shadow juries

Answer 29

Shadow juries
Create your own jury
Match demographics with sitting jury members
(e.g., McCabe & Purves, 1974)

Question 30

Jury Note Taking

Answer 30

Disadvantages:
Note takers exert influence over non-note takers
If there are disagreements, jurors will rely on those who took notes
Advantages:
Memory aid
Clear view of the case (memory)

Question 31

Inadmissible Evidence

Answer 31

Jurors do not ignore extra-legal or inadmissible evidence (Casper & Benedict, 1993)
Sometimes the back-fire effect occurs, the judge’s instruction to disregard the information actually makes it more memorable.

Question 32

Juror Competence

Answer 32

As case complexity increased, jurors less sure their verdict reflected a proper understanding of instructions (Heuer & Penrod, 1995)
Serious difficulty comprehending differences between legal concepts (Severance & Loftus, 1982)
Reasonable doubt
Criminal intent
Use of prior offence history
224 people called for jury duty, research indicated they understood less than 50% of instructionsComprehending evidence
Jurors are conscientious about their task, but this fades away during the trial (McCabe & Purves ,1974; Stephenson, 1992)
Visher (1987) found four types of evidence significantly influenced jurors:
Physical evidence,
Eyewitness testimony,
Discrediting testimony and evidence
Extra-legal factors of social class & education, personality, etc

Question 33

Jurors and circumstantial evidence

Answer 33

Empirical research indicated that jurors routinely undervalued circumstantial evidence such as DNA, fingerprints, and the like while overvaluing direct evidence such as eyewitness identifications and confessions.
“While the jury can contribute nothing of value in so far as the law is concerned, it has the capacity for infinite mischief, for twelve men can easily misunderstand more law in a minute than the judge can explain in an hour” - Judge Jerome Frank

Question 34

Conviction more likely from jury when

Answer 34

Conviction more likely with:
Older jurors
Higher educational standard (Hans & Vidmar, 1982)
Previous jury experience (Dillehay & Nietzel, 1985)
Female jurors
But only in rape cases (Hans & Vidmar, 1982) or child sexual abuse cases (Crowley et al., 1994)
Race of jury does not matter (Baldwin & McConville, 1979)

Question 35

The cognitive story model

Answer 35

Jurors actively construct explanations for the evidence and use this to guide their verdict
They interpret and elaborate on evidence to create a cohesive story
Jurors bring their own individual differences – attitudes, beliefs, knowledge – in contributing to the story
Study on 26 participants (simulated trial) demonstrated that different individual differences influenced different stories and therefore different verdicts.

Question 36

Defendant Characteristics

Answer 36

Physically attractive defendants are more likely to be acquitted (Michelini & Snodgrass, 1980) or receive a lighter sentence (Stewart, 1980)
Defendants are more likely to be seen as guilty if their ethnicity matches stereotypic expectations (Bodenhausen, 2000)
Racial minorities over-represented in custody
Australia – (2008), Indigenous people are 3% of the total population but are 28% of prison population. 30% of all Indigenous males will come before the courts.

Question 37

Deliberation

Answer 37

When jury members discuss the evidence privately among themselves to reach a verdict that is then provided to the court

Question 38

Polarization (Deliberation)

Answer 38

When individuals tend to become more extreme in their initial position following a group decision

Question 39

Leniency Bias (Deliberation)

Answer 39

When jurors move toward greater leniency during deliberations

Question 40

CSI effect

Answer 40

Education of jurors whereby they are more likely to convict a suspect if the procedures and techniques from television are used in real life.
Watching unrealistic crime shows influences jurors expectations and they demand more forensic evidence
DNA tests can take weeks or months and are expensive
DNA is not always required if other evidence is available
Gun residue tests are very difficult and time consuming
Blood splatter patterns alone cannot confirm what actually occurred
Fingerprints can take 3-4 weeks, IF the prints are in a database it can still take significant time to physically locate the person.
It is not that easy or common to get a ‘good fingerprint’Characters on show not only investigate (“process”) crime scenes, but they also conduct raids, engage in suspect pursuit and arrest, interrogate suspects, and solve cases, which falls under the responsibility of uniformed officers and detectives, not CSI personnel
Up to 40% of the scientific techniques used on CSI do not exist with current technology
Perpetrators are using ‘hints’ gained from television shows to attempt to hide their crimes.
Washing hands, making (rape) victims wash, trying not to leave DNA evidence behind, destroying evidence

Question 41

Modern Jurors

Answer 41

Internet and social media platforms’ accessibility means that potential jurors can access information about a case at their fingertips.
People so used to gaining instant information, find it very difficult to restrain from searching.
Can bias a juror either for or against a defendant.
Jurors not only obtain information but also post information about the case (such as on Facebook or Twitter)
Creating ‘new’ problems for legislation and the courts to try to solve.