New research brings another reason to watch for tired jurors in voir dire.
We've talked before about how you need to be aware in voir dire not only of jurors' past experiences, but also of how they are feeling on the day of trial. That post noted that sleepy jurors, for example, don't remember information well. A new study suggests something more dire: lack of sleep may impair our moral judgment.
Slower after 53 hours
The study is "The Effects of 53 Hours of Sleep Deprivation on Moral Judgment," by William Killgore and others, published in the journal Sleep (and downloadable there if you subscribe) and summarized in Medical News Today. The researchers asked 26 people, mostly men, to make judgments about the "appropriateness" of different responses to moral dilemmas, before and after 53 hours without sleep. (The abstract and summary don't say why not 52 hours, or 54. Maybe the subjects threatened to kill the researchers after 53.)
Lack of sleep made these people slower to choose a response, to the point where the researchers concluded that their moral judgment was impaired. The more emotionally wrenching the decision, the slower the response time. People who were already strong on an "emotional intelligence" scale, the researchers noted, were less affected by lack of sleep than others.
Slower and also harsher?
Some of the language discussing this study suggests that tired subjects made decisions not only more slowly, but also differently. In the Medical News Today summary, Dr. Killgore is said to insist that his findings "do not suggest that sleep deprivation leads to a decline in 'morality' or in the quality of moral beliefs," but only that it leads to slow response and to
the change in the leniency or permissiveness of response style as evidenced by the tendency to decide that particular courses of action were 'appropriate' before and after sleep loss.
This language is a little opaque, and I didn't subscribe to Sleep to read the underlying data, but it sounds like he's saying that subjects were more lenient when they were rested.
Likewise, the paper's abstract implies that when subjects were tired, they were more willing to go along with decisions they didn't really agree with:
The effect of sleep deprivation on the willingness to agree with solutions that violate personally held moral beliefs was moderated by the level of emotional intelligence.
For trial lawyers, one striking aspect of this research is that subjects were asked to agree or disagree to a set of choices, not to come up with their own moral responses. It's a limitation people rarely face in real life -- except when they sit on a jury. The jury instructions, the special verdict, and the need to be unanimous all limit jurors' moral choices in a way rarely found outside the courthouse and the research lab.
Are my jurors really that sleepy?
Hardly anybody really goes 53 hours without sleep in real life, though. So is this really an issue?
Fatigue is. Most of us have seen a juror nod off in court, and it's not just because we're dull. The National Sleep Foundation does an annual "Sleep in America Poll," focusing each year on a different set of issues. The last time they looked at the overall population was in 2002, and the results were predictably grim:
- "Overall, 74% of respondents in the 2002 study experienced at least one symptom of a sleep disorder a few nights a week or more."
- "A sizable proportion of adults (37%) report that they are so sleepy during the day that it interferes with their daily activities a few days a month or more; and 16% experience this level of daytime sleepiness a few days per week or more."
- "24% state they get less than the minimum amount of sleep they say they need."
That doesn't count fatigue caused by other factors than lack of sleep. Last month in Cleveland, a juror was dismissed "after falling asleep and becoming lethargic during deliberations" in a murder trial. The newspaper said he hadn't been taking medication he needed.
(Drawing by Peyri Leigh at http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=137240285&size=o; license details there.)