Facts into faults: The grammar of guilt in jury deliberations

Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations (CCIs), whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a normal, innocent person would have done, with the implication that the discrepancy indicates guilt. We examine the logic, variants, sequential precursors, and immediate consequences of this phenomenon in two real-life American criminal juries deliberating the same charges. This study offers a rare glimpse into the operation of real (rather than mock) juries, and specifically the way in which they appropriate a practice from ordinary conversation in order to perform the unordinary work demanded of them by the legal system.

Janus turns out to be one-faced: the judgment of the Russian Constitutional Court on the permissibility of examination of jurors in the light of foreign law

According to Article 56 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure, “a judge and a juror may not be examined as a witness about the circumstances of a criminal case which they have become aware of while participating in it”. The Russian Supreme Court has interpreted this rule as imposing a categorical prohibition to examine a juror even though the defense submits and tries to prove that jurors were not impartial due to the extraneous influence and unlawful threats that they confronted in a jury room. As a result, this approach, instead of ensuring the confidentiality of jury deliberations, has been rather used to preclude the discovery of procedural irregularities in reaching a verdict. In its judgment of 7 July 2020, the Russian Constitutional Court has softened this unreasonable restriction by ruling that jurors’ witness immunity is not absolute and appellate courts must use their testimony to establish facts relating to alleged attempts to place unlawful pressure on a jury by undermining the secrecy of jury deliberations. Based on a case file, including the petition that the author of this article drafted and filed to the Russian Constitutional Court, the article reconstructs the arguments invoked by the parties in the course of constitutional proceedings and assesses the approach taken by the Russian Constitutional Court to decide the case. In particular, the court has allowed examining jurors, but only with their consent. Having studied the experience of the countries where a jury system has been present for a long time, namely the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, the author argues that a post-trial examination of jurors is a recognized way to ensure the right of a defendant to an impartial jury. Among other things, the foreign jurisdictions obligate a juror to inform a judge about attempts to unlawfully influence a jury, empowers a judge to determine if there are sufficient grounds for summoning jurors as witnesses, and sets standards of examination. However, none of these legal orders requires that a juror give consent for examination. Therefore, the article concludes that the integrity of jurors in Russia should be protected not by enabling them to testify before an appellate court at their discretion but by strengthening their legal immunity, which in turn will strike an optimal balance between competing constitutional values.

Criminal Trials and Reforms Intended to Reduce the Impact of Race: A Review

This review collects initiatives and legal decisions designed to mitigate discrimination in pretrial decision making, jury selection, jury unanimity, and jury deliberations. It also reviews initiatives to interrupt implicit racial biases. Among these, Washington's new rule for jury selection stands alone in treating racism as the product of both individual actors’ decisions and long-standing legal structures. Washington's rule shows the limits of recent US Supreme Court decisions addressing discrimination in cases with unusual and clearly problematic facts. The court presents these cases as rare remediable aberrations, ignoring the well-documented history of racism in jury selection. The final section juxtaposes limited reforms with the contemporary prison abolitionist movement to illuminate boundaries of incremental reforms. Reforms must reflect cognizance of the extent to which racism exists at multiple levels. Reforms that do not are less likely to make change, because they are either narrow in scope or focused on discrimination by individuals.

Mock Jury and Juror Responses to Uncharged Acts of Sexual Misconduct

Internationally, admissible incriminating evidence of uncharged acts by the accused is presumed unfairly prejudicial, and remains controversial. In an experimental study, 325 jury-eligible citizens were randomly assigned to a simulated trial in which the accused faced two charges. Juries were exposed to no evidence of uncharged acts or prejudicial evidence describing four uncharged sexual acts by the accused reported by the complainant or two independent witnesses. Jury inferences about the accused’s sexual interest in children and his criminal intent were logically related to the source and type of evidence. While ratings of the likelihood of culpability increased with evidence of uncharged acts, juries were reluctant to convict solely on the basis of the complainant’s word. Jury deliberations disclosed that prejudicial evidence did not induce impermissible reasoning or a lower threshold of proof. Multiple convergent measures revealed little danger of unfair prejudice to the accused.

10. The jury

The jury consists of twelve randomly selected members of the public, who decide guilt or innocence in the most serious criminal trials in the Crown Court. This ensures that the general public are represented in the criminal justice system. This chapter explains the rules on eligibility for, and disqualification or excusal from, jury service. It considers issues such as the power of the jury to acquit in defiance of the evidence (‘jury equity’); the confidentiality of jury deliberations and the implications of that for appeals; the ethnic composition of a jury; the rights of both prosecution and defence to challenge jurors; jury vetting; whether juries should be excluded from certain trials, such as those involving serious fraud or where there is evidence of jury ‘tampering’; whether the accused should be able to ‘waive’ their right to jury trial; and the impact of social media on jury trials. It concludes by examining the relative advantages and disadvantages of jury trials.

What do we know about rape myths and juror decision making?

This paper presents overwhelming evidence that prejudicial and false beliefs held by jurors about rape affect their evaluation of the evidence and their decision making in rape cases. The paper draws together for the first time the available evidence from both quantitative and qualitative studies (most of which are not found in law journals, but rather in scientific outlets, most commonly those focusing on experimental psychology). The quantitative research demonstrates that mock jurors’ scores on so-called ‘rape myth scales’ are significant predictors of their judgments about responsibility, blame and (most importantly) verdict. The qualitative research indicates that jurors frequently express problematic views about how ‘real’ rape victims would behave and what ‘real’ rape looks like during mock jury deliberations and that even those who score relatively low on abstract rape myth scales can express prejudicial beliefs when deliberating in a particular case. The studies vary in terms of their realism, but it is important to note that some of the studies reported here were highly realistic trial reconstructions, involving representative samples of jurors drawn from the community, live trial reconstructions, evidence-in-chief and cross-examination, accurate legal directions and deliberation in groups. The review concludes by examining the evidence on whether juror education—whether in the form of judicial directions or expert evidence—might be effective in addressing problematic attitudes.

The Right to a Well-Rested Jury

The vast amount of control that state trial judges exercise over the dynamics of their courtrooms is well established. The length of trial days and jury deliberations, however, has received little scholarly attention. Longstanding research has conclusively established the disruptive effects of sleep deprivation on many of the mental facilities necessary for juries to competently fulfill their duties. By depriving juries of sleep, trial judges may be compromising the fair rights of criminal defendants for the sake of efficiency. This Note argues that trial judges must use their discretion to ensure juries are well-rested, keeping jurors’ needs in mind. Further, state legislatures have a responsibility to properly fund state courts and to pass legislation that ensures overlong tri-al days do not impact verdicts handed down.

The Philadelphia Treason Trials, 1778–1779

This chapter begins by introducing the defendants, who were predominantly Quaker and Anglican artisans of relatively modest means. Some had actively supported resistance activities and many had connections to the jurors and grand jurors. The chapter then turns to the role of defense counsel, the witnesses and testimony presented at trial, the court’s rulings on contested issues, and jury deliberations. It argues that the verdicts were shaped in significant part by aversion to the death penalty as a punishment for treason. Even the few juries that convicted defendants petitioned the state’s executive authority for clemency, as did hundreds of other Philadelphians. Although treason was nominally the highest crime, juries simply didn’t view it that way. Persons who had sided with the enemy were not incorrigible criminals, but friends and neighbors who had made an unfortunate political choice and were fully capable of redemption.

Storytelling Rituals in Jury Deliberations

Research on jury deliberation tends to focus on deliberative outcomes, such as verdict decisions. Less attention is paid to the actual process of deliberation. This paper analyzes a video recording of a mock jury deliberation in a simulated criminal trial, focusing on facial expression, gesture, and discourse. Drawing on ethnomethodology and micro-sociological theories of ritual, I examine how jurors make sense of the evidence presented to them and how they work together to collectively produce a coherent narrative of events. I argue that a focus on the ritual dynamics of the deliberation help to understand how such a co-production can occur. La investigación sobre la deliberación del jurado tiende a centrarse en los resultados de esa deliberación, como pueden ser los veredictos. Menos atención genera el proceso mismo de deliberación. Este artículo analiza una grabación de vídeo de la deliberación de un jurado en un simulacro de juicio penal, y se fija especialmente en las expresiones faciales, los gestos y los discursos. Basándome en la etnometodología y en teorías de ritual microsociológicas, examino la forma en que los jurados buscan el sentido de las pruebas que se les presentan y la forma en que trabajan juntos para producir una narración coherente de los hechos. Argumento que poner el énfasis en las dinámicas rituales de la deliberación ayuda a entender cómo se realiza esa producción colectiva.