Courts II Flashcards
1
Q
Jury research- History
A
- Kalvin and Zeisel (1966): The American Jury.
- Compared actual jury verdicts with judge verdicts in 3,500 civil and criminal jury trials.
- Judges and juries agreed on verdicts in 78% of trials.
- Juries were more lenient than judges in 19% of trials and more severe than judges in 3% of trials.
- Interviewed jurors from 225 trials- compared first ballot verdict (when commencing deliberation) to final verdict.
- First ballot was the final verdict in 90% of cases.
- This is the most replicated finding in the literature.
2
Q
research on jury
A
- Research on juror decision making ceased until the 1970s.
- From the 1970s- new interest:
- Upholding the use of juries with less than 12 people.
- Non-unanimous verdicts.
- Research in the 1970s focused on the effect of jury size, decision rules, and the effect of other extra-legal variables on decision making.
- In the 1980s, the diversity of jury research grew and placed emphasis on examining:
- Juror demographic characteristics.
- Juror dispositional characteristics.
- Effect of trial structure etc.
3
Q
Legal variables:
A
- Aspects associated with the case
- Matters related to jury functioning such as size, judicial instructions, decision rules
- Case type, strength of evidence
- All aspects of juror interaction during deliberation.
4
Q
Extra-legal variables:
A
- Aspects not relevant to the case that should have no probative value
- Individual difference variables in relation to all parties to proceedings such as gender, age, personality traits.
5
Q
Legal variables: Judicial instructions
A
- Limiting instructions are not effective and can cause an increase in the targeted behavior.
- Specifically, juries:
- Confuse evidence during deliberation.
- Show “spillover” bias against accused in joined trials
- Consider pretrial publicity
- Take into account past criminal records
- Jurors do attend to “neutral” instructions that provide information or encourage jurors to use existing information.
- So- tell jurors not to do something and they do the opposite.
- Encourage them to do something and they will try to accommodate.
- This suggests that juries do incorporate extralegal information within the decision-making process and that judicial instructions designed to attenuate this effect have little impact.
6
Q
Jurors don’t understand:
A
- Legal jargon.
- Structure of instructions.
- Convoluted logic
7
Q
instructions at the beginning of the trail
A
- Research has also examined the benefit of providing jurors with instructions at the beginning and end of the trial, instead of only at the end.
- The rationale for pre-instruction is that it provides a cognitive framework for jurors to organize and retain the evidence.
8
Q
Heuer and Penrod (1989)
A
Pre-instruction helps evaluate evidence within the required legal framework but doesn’t help with memory recall, or impact verdicts.
9
Q
Bourgeois, Horowitz, ForterLee and Grahe (1995)
A
Pre-instructed deliberating jurors awarded higher damages to plaintiffs in a civil suit.
10
Q
Legal variables: Inadmissible evidence
A
- Inadmissible evidence is information not formally admitted into evidence
- g., Hearsay evidence, evidence obtained via illegal methods
- Judges may rule evidence inadmissible if they believe the jury won’t be able to evaluate it appropriately or will likely to become confused by it.
- Often, a jury will hear evidence that is later ruled inadmissible.
- Motivated forgetting is challenging and research tends to show that this information does impact on decision-making processes
11
Q
Perry v The Queen
A
The judge had wrongly admitted evidence showing that three people the accused had a past relationship with had also died of poisoning.
12
Q
Legal variables: Joinder of charges and offenders
A
- The document containing the written charges against the accused is called the indictment.
- The Criminal Code indicates that the indictment contains 1 charge only
- But… The Criminal Code makes provisions for the joinder of specific offences
- Provision is also made for the joint trial of offenders.
- This means 2 or more people are charged with committing separate indictable offences in that same indictment.
- These people are tried together.
- This can be done if the offences arise out of the same or closely related facts
- There is also provision for the joint trial of principal offenders and accessories to commission of an offence.
13
Q
3 sources of prejudice in a joined trial recognised by the courts:
A
- Confusing evidence amongst charges.
- Accumulation of evidence across charges.
- Inferences that are subsequently drawn about the accused’s character
14
Q
Research examining joinder of charges showed;
A
- When a trial is joined, the accused is more likely to found guilty than when it is not joined.
- The first named accused is more likely to be found guilty than the second.
15
Q
Confusion (Joinder of charges)
A
Facts relating to one charge were used to substantiate another charge. Jurors confuse evidence among charges and accused persons.
