JURIES VERDICTS INFLUENCE

How are the Juries verdicts influenced by their individual dispositions and by their working together? Explain with examples from Pakistani Society.

A jury is a sworn body of people convened to render an impartial verdict (a finding of fact on a question) officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment. Modern juries tend to be found in courts to judge whether an accused person is not guilty or guilty of a crime. (There is no such verdict as "innocent"). A person who is serving on a jury is called a juror. These courtroom influences upon “the average juror” are worth pondering. But no juror is the average juror; each carries into the courthouse individual attitudes and personalities. And when deliberating, they influence one another. 

JUROR COMPREHENSION

In making their decisions, jurors first construct a story that makes sense of all the evidence . After observing one murder trial, some jurors concluded that a quarrel made the defendant angry, triggering him to get a knife, search for the decedent, and stab him to death. Others surmised that the frightened defendant picked up a knife which he used to defend himself when he later encountered the decedent. When the jurors begin deliberating, it surprises many that others have constructed stories different from their own. This implies and research confirms that jurors are persuaded when attorneys present evidence in the order of a narrative story. In felony cases where the national conviction rate is 80 percent the prosecution case more often than the defense case follows a story structure. Next the jurors must grasp the essentials of the judge's instructions concerning the available verdict categories. For a judge's instructions to be effective, jurors must first understand them. Study after study has found that many people do not understand the standard legalese of judicial instructions. Depending on the type of case, a jury may be told that the standard of proof is a "preponderance of the evidence," "clear and convincing evidence," or "beyond a reasonable doubt." Such statements may have one meaning for the legal community and different meanings in the minds of jurors. In one study of Nevada criminal instructions, viewers of videotaped instructions could answer only 15 percent of 89 questions posed to them about what they had heard. Jurors may be further confused if the criteria change as a jury moves from the trial phase that determines guilt or innocence into the penalty phase. In North Carolina, for example, jurors are to convict only if there is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." But a "preponderance of the evidence" is sufficient when judging whether mitigating circumstances, such as an abusive childhood, should preclude a death sentence.

Finally, jurors must compare their explanatory story with the verdict categories. When using the judge's definition of, say, justifiable self-defense, jurors must decide whether "pinned against a wall" matches their understanding of the required circumstance "unable to escape." Often, though, a judge's abstract, jargon-filled definition of verdict categories. loses in the competition with the jurors' own images ("mental prototypes") of these crimes. Vicki Smith (1991) reports that, regardless of the judge's definition, if a defendant's actions matches jurors' images of "vandalism," "assault," or "robbery," they likely will find the person guilty.

SELECTION OF JURY

Given the variations among individual jurors, can trial lawyers use the jury selection processes to stack a jury in their favor? Legal folklore suggests sometimes they can. One president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America boldly proclaimed, "Trial attorneys are acutely attuned to the nuances of human behavior, which enables them to detect the minutest traces of bias or inability to reach an appropriate decision". Mindful that people's assessments of others are error-prone, social psychologists doubt that attorneys come equipped with fine-tuned social Geiger counters In several celebrated trials, survey researchers therefore used "scientific Jury selection" to help attorneys weed out those likely to be unsympathetic. One famous trial involved two of President Nixon's former cabinet members, conservatives John Mitchell and Maurice Stans. A survey revealed that from the defense's viewpoint the worst possible juror was "a liberal, Jewish, Democrat who reads the New York Times or the Post, listens to Walter Cronkite, is interested in political affairs, and is well-informed about Water-gate". In the first nine trials relying on such methods, the defense won seven.

Despite the excitement—and ethical concern—about scientific jury selection, experiments reveal that attitudes and personal characteristics don't always predict verdicts. There are "no magic questions to be asked of prospective jurors, not even a guarantee that a particular survey will detect useful attitude-behavior or personality-behavior relationships," caution Steven Pen-rod and Brian Cutler (1987). Researchers Michael Saks and Reid Hastie agree: 'The studies are unanimous in showing that evidence is a substantially more potent determinant of jurors' verdicts than the individual characteristics of jurors". In courtrooms, jurors' public pledge of fairness and the -judge's instruction to "be fair" strongly commit most jurors to the norm of fairness.

"DEATH-QUALIFIED" JURORS

A close case can, however, be decided by who gets selected for the jury. In criminal cases, people who do not oppose the death penalty—and who therefore are eligible to serve when a death sentence is possible—are more prone to favor the prosecution, to feel that courts coddle criminals, and to oppose protecting the constitutional rights of defendants. Simply put, those who favor the death penalty are more concerned with crime control and less concerned with due process of law. When a court dismisses potential jurors who have moral scruples against the death penalty, it constructs a jury that is more likely to vote guilty. The research record is "unified," reports Phoebe Ellsworth: "Defendants in capital-punishment cases do assume the extra handicap of juries predisposed to find them guilty." What is more, conviction-prone jurors tend also to be more authoritarian—more rigid, punitive, closed to mitigating circumstances and contemptuous of those with lower status. Because the legal system operates on tradition and precedent, such research findings only slowly alter judicial practice. In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court in a split decision overturned a lower-court ruling that "death-qualified" jurors are indeed a biased sample. Ellsworth (1989) believes the Court in this case disregarded the compelling and consistent evidence partly because of its "ideological commitment to capital punishment" and partly because of the havoc that would result if the convictions of thousands of people on death row had to be reconsidered.

THE JURY AS A GROUP

Imagine a jury that having finished a trial, has entered the jury room to begin its deliberations. Researchers Harry Kalven and Hans Zeisel (1996) reported that chances are about 2 in 3 that the jurors will initially not agree on a verdict. Yet, after discussion, the odds reach almost 95 percent that they will emerge with a consensus. Obviously group influence has occurred. In the United States alone, 300,000 times a year small groups sampled from the 3 million people called for jury duty convene to seek a group decision (Kagehiro, 1990). Are they subject to the social influences that mold other decision groups to patterns of majority and minority influence, to group polarization to groupthink? 

The law prohibits observation of actual juries. So researchers simulate the jury process by presenting a case to “mock juries” and having them deliberate like a real jury would. In a series of such studies at the University of Illinois , James Davis, Robert Holt, Norbert Kerr, and Garold Stasser tested various mathematical schemes for predicting group decisions, including decisions by mock juries (Davis & others, 1975, 1977, 1989; Kerr & others, 1976). Will some mathematical combination of people’s initial decisions predict their final group decision? Davis and his colleagues found that the scheme which predicts best varies according to the nature of the case. But in several experiments a “two-third-majority” scheme fared best: The group verdict was usually the alternative favored by at least two-thirds of the jurors at the outset. Without such a majority, a hung jury was likely.

Likewise, in Kalven and Zeisel’s survey of juries, 9 in 10 reached the verdict favored by the majority on the first ballot. Although you or I might fantasize about someday being the courageous lone juror who sways the majority, the fact is it seldom happens. 

THE JURORS AS INDIVIDUAL

In forming their judgments, jurors:-

• Construct a story that explains the evidence.

• Consider the judge’s instructions

• Compare their understandings with the possible verdicts

• In a close case, the jurors own characteristics can influence their verdicts.