I've been slacking a little on getting these posts out by Friday, but I'm getting back on track. This one is directly relevant to lecture, as it covers aspects that directly affect jury verdicts and the quality of those verdicts. In the taxonomy of jury studies, this is one that uses actual jury members, so there are some specific advantages and disadvantages on that basis alone. While the results can be assumed to be very valid and relatable to the real world, the experimenters couldn't control for specific variables or conditions. Since this was a survey-style study, their goal was to identify response trends that could be attributed to specific characteristics of the jurors. Of course, there are also strengths and weaknesses inherent in surveys (respondent truthfulness, self-selection, etc.) but we won't go into all of those right now.The authors put forward several hypotheses to test. Specifically, they propose that jury members will be more likely to deliberate when they are motivated (1d) and have a positive view of the American jury system (1a), and when the jury is made up of more similar people (1b) with more political and educational experience (1c). Further, they're interested in whether it's better to have more juries be more homogeneous with regards to these variables, even if that means everyone's lower on them, and how deliberation affects satisfaction. This goes back to how Dr. Geiselman mentioned how judges generally try to be accommodating to jurors to encourage them to come back (though this doesn't exactly square with the exasperated and condescending behavior described in the book during trials; hopefully these are the exceptions).
One thing you might notice about the study: these are small juries. The mean was 6 jurors, but it says there were some with 5 or 7. I, for one, wasn't previously aware that jury size could deviate like this. But keep in mind that this sample doesn't use the standard 12-member jury. Do you think this might affect the ability to generalize the results? We already know that smaller juries are more likely to reach a verdict; certainly the quality of deliberation has some effect on that. Another thing to keep in mind while reading the results is the type of trials these juries tried:
Nearly a third (32.2%) of those participating in this study sat on juries hearing lowlevel assault charges, another 16.1% heard drunk-driving cases, and the rest heard a range of minor offenses from sexual indiscretion to reckless driving. The median juror spent 2 days in the courtroom, with 91% spending 3 or fewer days there. The median juror deliberated for no more than 1 hour, with 84% deliberating for 2 hours or less.So these cases were relatively short, with most deliberations lasting less than 2 hours. This might mean that the results won't hold for longer deliberations.
But on to the results. Tables 2 & 3 clearly lay out the correlations between the variables, and the findings are quite striking. [Nota bene: in psychology, and social psychology in particular, a correlation of .25 is actually pretty big. It's notoriously difficult to isolate the specific factors that lead to these correlations, so finding these numbers in a survey study pretty strongly supports the conclusions. And when interpreting the findings, keep in mind that a correlation of .30 explains about 10% of the total variance. Still not very big, but significant.] Both political confidence and interest in the trial led to greater ratings of deliberations about the facts of the case and the freedom of expression in deliberation. Greater trust in the jury system was linked with jurors that treated each other more respectfully, and greater political partiality was correlated with more debate over the instructions. Absolute levels of political knowledge and education weren't correlated with anything, but the differences between jurors definitely had an effect: across the board, differences in political knowledge (and in political confidence) were associated with reduced deliberation; however, greater differences in education levels led to jurors rating respectful listening higher. Finally, when there were bigger differences in interest in the trial, jurors discussed the facts of the case more.
So what implications do these findings have? Well, it's clear that, in this sample, juror characteristics affected the quality of the deliberation, which in turn affected the satisfaction of the jurors. But from Table 1, it's clear that the ratings for all the aspects of deliberation were generally high across the board. So did these factors really affect any of the verdicts? And, as I mentioned before, can these results generalize to larger juries or more complex cases? Also, how well do these findings represent and relate to verdict juries - those who start the deliberation with a preliminary vote? The book suggests that there are definite differences between verdict juries and juries who wait until after deliberation to vote. Clearly, there's a lot of complicated issues arising from jury studies. Anyone inspired to get a subscription to Jurimetrics?
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