Trial lawyers aren't the only ones who want to know what happens when the jury room door closes. Some of the most avid jury scholars don't care what the actual verdict is -- but their work is useful to those of us who do care.
A lot of people in the courthouse don't know it, but scholars argue about the real role of the jury: is it a meaningful forum for citizen participation in government, or just one more place where the powerful push the disenfranchised aside? The scholars at the Jury And Democracy Project at the University of Washington come from many disciplines (law, sociology, communications, political science) to study one aspect of the debate. What matters to them is the way jury service "can change how citizens think of themselves and their society."
Most recently, the Jury And Democracy Project attempts to determine "the degree to which everyday juries actually engage in the communication behaviors that constitute meaningful deliberation." The paper is "Do Juries Deliberate? A Study of Deliberation, Individual Difference, and Group Member Satisfaction at a Municipal Courthouse," by project director John Gastil with Ph.D. candidates Stephanie Burkhalter and Laura Black. (Thanks to Psychology and Crime News for picking this up.)
"Deliberative rigor, listening, equality, and respect."
The authors questioned 267 actual Seattle jurors, in a two-part survey. Before they were selected for juries, the jurors answered questions about their attitudes and characteristics: trust in the jury system, eagerness to serve on a jury, interest in the trial, political knowledge, education, and political self-confidence. At the end of their service, the jurors answered questions about their jury experience.
The conclusion is a strong endorsement of jury deliberations:
[T]his study provides clear evidence that jurors do understand their experience as being a largely deliberative one in the strongest sense of that word. . . . Fewer than 10% of juries had a single member who disagreed with [statements describing the process as containing] deliberative rigor, listening, equality, and respect. . . . [F]ully 98% of participants found that they had adequate opportunities to express their views of the case.
Some surprises
As often happens, some of the most interesting findings of the study were the ones that surprised the researchers:
- Juries containing a mix of ideological views followed instructions more closely. "[T]he more [ideologically] diverse juries were actually more likely to scrutinize the judge’s instructions. We take this to indicate that the political diversity on these juries was constructive, likely prompting jurors to consider different interpretations of the law."
- The deliberative process was just as strong when jurors lacked "expertise" in the things that might have improved deliberations -- political knowledge and education. "The expertise measures predicted higher participation levels but not deliberation, per se."
- When some jurors in the group were "expert" deliberators and others were not, the quality of deliberations actually suffered. "Within a jury, the net result of having significantly unequal knowledge and confidence levels may be a shared perception that the experts will (and do) run the show."
How do I use this?
There are interesting suggestions here for trial lawyers, especially if your argument requires thought, discussion, and time. Both in voir dire and in presentation, you can be aware of jurors' political knowledge, education, and viewpoint, and of whether you're talking to a jury that is diverse and balanced by these measures, or one that is one-sided or unequal. You may find yourself, for example, explicitly asking jurors in closing argument to take advantage of their diversity to allow a full discussion, or to move past the sophistication of a few jurors to be sure all are heard.
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Source notes:
- The Jury And Democracy Project lists and links to its various writings here.
- There are limits to any study, and the main limit to this one is Seattle itself. Seattle is an unusually homogeneous and educated community, and the jurors who responded to this survey exceeded even Seattle averages on both counts. More than 92% of them were white or Asian-American, and fewer than 4% were African-American. The median educational level was a college degree, and over 40% of the respondents had more education than that.
- In addition, Seattle municipal courts use six-person juries. As the authors point out and as mock trials and other research show, larger groups interact very differently from smaller ones.
- Finally, it would seem possible that the survey itself "primed" the respondents to deliberate better than they would have without the pre-deliberation questionnaire.
(Photo by Rick Takagi at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rt425/461046004/; license details there.)