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Contextualizing Jury Participation: Case-, Jury-, and Juror-Level Predictors of Participation in Jury Deliberations
Abstract
Fully participatory jury deliberations figure prominently in the idealized view of the American jury system, where balanced participation among diverse jurors leads to more accurate fact-finding and instills greater public confidence in the legal system. However, research more than 50 years ago indicated that jury-room interactions are shaped by social status, with upper-class men participating more than their lower-class and female counterparts. The effects of social status on juror participation have been examined only sporadically since then, and rarely with actual jurors. We utilize data from 2,306 criminal jurors serving on 311 juries in four different courts to consider whether – and in what conditions – participation in jury deliberations differs across social groups. Our results indicate the continuing importance of social status in structuring jury-room interactions, but also reveal some surprising patterns with respect to race and gender that depart from earlier research. We also find that contextual factors including location, case characteristics, and faction size shape the relationship between social status and participation. We conclude with a critical discussion of our results and urge other researchers to take into account contextual factors when examining how individual juror characteristics shape what happens inside the jury room.
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This article provides a comprehensive review of the empirical research on jury decision making published between 1955 and 1999. In total, 206 distinguishable studies involving deliberating juries (actual or mock) were located and grouped into 4 categories on the basis of their focal variables: (a) procedural characteristics, (b) participant characteristics, (c) case characteristics, and (d) deliberation characteristics. Numerous factors were found to have consistent effects on jury decisions: definitions of key legal terms, verdict/sentence options, trial structure, jury-defendant demographic similarity, jury personality composition related to authoritarianism/dogmatism, jury attitude composition, defendant criminal history, evidence strength, pretrial publicity, inadmissible evidence, case type, and the initial distribution of juror verdict preferences during deliberation. Key findings, emergent themes, practical implications, and future research directions are discussed.
Race in the Jury Box focuses on the racially unrepresentative jury as one of the remaining barriers to racial equality and a recurring source of controversy in American life. Because members of minority groups remain underrepresented on juries, various communities have tried race-conscious jury selection, termed "affirmative jury selection." The authors argue that affirmative jury selection can insure fairness, verdict legitimization, and public confidence in the justice system. This book offers a critical analysis and systematic examination of possible applications of race-based jury selection, examining the public perception of these measures and their constitutionality. The authors make use of court cases, their own experiences as jury consultants, and jury research, as well as statistical surveys and analysis. The work concludes with the presentation of four strategies for affirmative jury selection.
The American jury is heralded as an institution that is simultaneously representative and egalitarian. However, jury studies
conducted 50 years ago found that white, upper-class men dominate jury deliberations, presumably due to their higher status
outside of the jury room. Logistic regression analysis of dyadic influence inside the jury room updates this research. Results
indicate that today upper-class jurors alone — not men, not whites — are regarded as most influential in deliberations. Upper-class
jurors' influence is not simply a product of status deference. Rather, upper-class jurors seem to influence deliberations
due to generalized expectations of their competence or their possession of skill sets that enhance jury room performance.
We conclude that increased statistical representation in the jury pool does not guarantee that diverse views will affect verdicts.
Procedural influence in consensus formation across multiple subgroups was examined. When a cross-sectional decision must be established by a joint conference of all members, 2 consensus procedures are conceivable. The 2-stage procedure encourages each subgroup to coordinate its members' opinions prior to the joint conference; discussion follows 2 steps, first at the subgroup and then at the entire group level. In contrast, the single-stage procedure calls for the joint conference immediately to minimize the opportunities for opinion exchange at subgroups. It was predicted and confirmed that, compared with the single-stage method, the 2-stage procedure enhanced the power of local majorities at the subgroup level and hampered the tendency for the global majorities to prevail in the final decision. Numerical simulations further explored theoretical implications of distinguishing the local and global majorities for collective decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The 1st study extrapolated earlier findings (J. H. Davis et al; see record
1989-15329-001) that the critical 4th voter in 6-person mock juries evenly divided between guilty- and not-guilty-inclined jurors (3,3) were significantly influenced by the preceding sequence (guilty or not-guilty faction voting first) and timing of a straw poll. Results implied that both procedural variables would have an effect on jury verdict distributions, but their magnitude was surprisingly low, especially for sequence. Exp 2 focused only on sequential voting in (4,2) groups in which sequential voting by majority-minority factions first was again observed to influence critical individuals, although the effect was sharply mediated by the "leniency bias." The additional empirical parameter estimates permitted a more comprehensive exploration of probable verdict consequences. Results showed that group-level decisions, under the particular conditions studied, remained counterintuitively robust against significant social influence pressures observed at the individual level, and familiar from numerous studies of conformity and minority influence. Discussion emphasized conceptual hazards associated with inferring group-level actions from individual member behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
PART I THE LOGIC OF HIERARCHICAL LINEAR MODELING Series Editor 's Introduction to Hierarchical Linear Models Series Editor 's Introduction to the Second Edition 1.Introduction 2.The Logic of Hierarchical Linear Models 3. Principles of Estimation and Hypothesis Testing for Hierarchical Linear Models 4. An Illustration PART II BASIC APPLICATIONS 5. Applications in Organizational Research 6. Applications in the Study of Individual Change 7. Applications in Meta-Analysis and Other Cases where Level-1 Variances are Known 8. Three-Level Models 9. Assessing the Adequacy of Hierarchical Models PART III ADVANCED APPLICATIONS 10. Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models 11. Hierarchical Models for Latent Variables 12. Models for Cross-Classified Random Effects 13. Bayesian Inference for Hierarchical Models PART IV ESTIMATION THEORY AND COMPUTATIONS 14. Estimation Theory Summary and Conclusions References Index About the Authors
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone.
When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.
Numerous studies have examined the relationships between religious factors and aggregate suicide rates, with inconsistent
findings. We extend research on this topic by focusing on an overlooked variable: religious homogeneity, or the extent to
which community residents adhere to a single religion or a small number of faiths. After developing a series of arguments
linking religious homogeneity with lower suicide rates, we investigate this relationship using 1980 data on 296 SMSAs. As
hypothesized, religious homogeneity is inversely associated with suicide rates; its estimated effects are greater than those
of the other religious variables that are widely used in studies of suicide — percent Catholic and church member rates — and
they persist despite controls for established covariates of suicide rates. On closer inspection, we find regional differences
in the apparent influence of religious homogeneity. Protective effects are strongest in the SMSAs of the Northeast, and they
also surface in the South, while they are weaker in other areas of the U.S.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
This research examines the behavior of jurors as active information processors. Our experimental examination of the performance of the civil jury in response to a complex price-fixing case varies the information provided to jurors about the consequences of their damage award decisions (i.e., the treble damage rule) and the type of expert testimony (statistical models vs. concrete yardstick models). We find, consistent with a picture of the jury as active rather than passive, that jurors are more likely to follow judicial instructions when they are given explanations rather than bald admonitions. In addition, complex expert testimony neither overpowers the jurors nor is dismissed by them. The expert presenting a statistical model is viewed as having higher expertise but lower clarity; as a result the statistical expert and the expert presenting a more concrete model are not significantly different in their persuasiveness. Finally, in contrast to most research on the criminal jury, we find that deliberations do affect jury awards.
In this article we propose a theoretical model of the dynamics underlying the experiences of women and people of color in demographically diverse decision-making groups. Based upon the framework provided by the model, we then describe the different roles women and people of color may experience in these groups, and we examine the dynamics by which their roles may change over time. Finally, we discuss implications for future research and management practice.
For years, constitutional doctrine had invalidated judicial attempts to construct community-reflective juries. In the recently decided case of Grutter v. Bollinger, however, the Supreme Court held that where a diversity-enhancing system promotes the performance of internal processes of and enhances the legitimacy of a core governmental function, that classification system (if narrowly tailored) fulfills a compelling governmental interest and survives strict scrutiny. This Note applies Grutter to the jury context by examining the possibility that diverse juries function better than their homogenous counterparts. Thereafter, this Note argues that, much like in the educational affirmative action context, judicial construction of community-reflective juries enhances the perceived legitimacy of the justice system. All these gains can be achieved while tailoring the government classification system as narrowly as the system upheld in Grutter. As a result of these benefits, jury construction efforts should be allowable under Grutter and the Fourteenth Amendment.
Gender is among the most extesively investigated constructs of the social sciences. It is a basis of macrosocial organization and an individual characteristic that shapes microsocial interaction. The social psychological literature contains at least four alternative conceptions of how gender operates in face-to-face interaction: the normative-influence, the informational-influence, the weighted-averaging, and the expectation-states hypotheses. Using a rich set of experimental data on mixed-sex problem-solving discussions entailing "feminine," gender-neutral, and "masculine" tasks, we investigated the relative empirical adequacy of these four hypotheses. Dependent variables included amount of time speaking and frequencies of gesturing, speech initiantions, looking while speaking, looking while listening, chin thrusts, smiling, laughing, and self-touching. Dovidio and his colleagues reported that for some measures, but not for others, statistical interactions exist between the actor's gender and the gender linkage of the task. Using a more precise theoretical analysis, we found that the expectation-states hypothesis describes the first category of variables extremely well, while the normative-influence hypothesis describes the second category extremely well. The weighted-averaging hypothesis deviates systematically from the empirical data collected by Dovidio and his colleagues. We conjecture that "gender effects" in putatively task-oriented interaction emanate from gender-as-worth and from gender-as-personal-identity. Some implications for further research are discussed.
True gender integration in the workplace faces barriers at several levels: societal, organizational, interactional, and individual. Recognition of the problems specific to each level greatly enhances our understanding of gender inequality in the workplace, and suggests new approaches to change. In this introduction I review articles in this special issue of "Sociological Perspectives" in the context of these four levels, and relate the themes of the issue to other research on gender integration in the workplace.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
As sociologists look into the new century for sources of explanatory leverage, we argue that small group research contains untapped theoretical potential. Small groups have been largely ignored as a topic in their own right; instead they are treated as a "black box" in which other social phenomena are observed. We propose a reassessment. By opening the "black box," sociologists will find that the core issues of the discipline come together in small groups. We draw together the literatures of five domains, across which the findings on small groups are fragmented. These findings show that small groups are the locus of both social control and social change, where networks are formed, culture is created, and status order is made concrete. We refer to these as the controlling, contesting, organizing, representing, and allocating features of small groups. As the crossroads where agency meets structure, small groups offer the micro foundations for a twenty-first century sociological agenda.
After a century of struggle to gain the right to serve on juries, females are still viewed, both in the literature and in lawyers' folklore, as being submisive, emotional, dependent and envious. The research on sex differences in jury deliberations is both complex and dated. Two studies are reported in which the differences between the sexes in deliberation are analyzed with respect to verdict, amount and nature of participation, persuasiveness and perceptions. Findings indicate no significant differences between the sexes in terms of verdict or persuasiveness. Study I reports males offering more suggestions, oppinions and information than females whereas Study II shows no differences in the amount and nature of participation. In spite of the similarities between the sexes on verdict, interaction style and persuasiveness, males were perceived to be more independent, rational, strong, confident, influential and as more of a leader than were females.
In 1954 social scientists and legal scholars from the University of Chicago Law School's Jury Project recorded six jury deliberations in Wichita, Kansas. Over a year later, news of the recordings erupted into a national scandal, and the researchers were subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. This article examines how the recordings came to be viewed as a violation of the tradition of trial by jury and a "stepping stone to wrecking the entire system of justice." I begin by reviewing letters exchanged among the researchers, which illustrate how they easily arranged the jury recordings with the help of both judges and lawyers. I then analyze arguments against the jury recordings expressed in more than 100 newspaper editorials about the incident. Vehement criticisms of the jury recordings indicate that secret deliberations are viewed as both practical and symbolic underpinnings of the tradition of trial by jury. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this case for more recent revelations of jury room discussions.
Much research examines the organizational changes brought by equal employment opportunity (EEO) law, but it remains unclear whether establishments formally charged with employment discrimination and found in violation of EEO laws actually improve workplace conditions for women and racial minorities. Building on economic and institutional accounts of organizational responses to legal intervention, this article assesses the effects of discrimination charges and their resolutions on changes in establishment-level occupational segregation by sex and race from 1990 to 2002. Using data from a national random sample of work establishments matched to discrimination-charge data, I examine the direct impact of charges on workplaces, as well as the indirect pressures that establishments experience in their legal and organizational environments. For sex segregation, I find that establishments do not desegregate in the wake of discrimination charges filed directly against them, but they do respond to EEO enforcement in their industrial fields and legal environments. For race segregation, organizational factors - rather than legal intervention - are the primary predictors of desegregation. To the extent that EEO enforcement encourages organizational change, it does so indirectly, operating through establishments' industrial and legal environments.
This paper examines the effects of race and gender on patterns of interpersonal interaction in a police patrol bureau, and the organizational structural devices and cultural underpinnings that work together to obstruct the integration of women and blacks into the bureau. Analysis and interpretation of qualitative data gathered during field research in one midwestern police department are used to develop the subject. Gender and racial integration failed despite various organizational structural devices to “level the playing field” and carry out integration. No one single structural, political, or individual characteristic or condition appeared to be a decisive cause of the lack of integration. Instead, races and genders were divided by features of organizational life such as tensions, conflicts, and intraorganizational feuding about affirmative action, dual promotion lists, the decision-making process related to job assignments, police leagues in the department, and the presence of women in patrol.
Drawing on Kanter’s (1977) observations and assertions, this study employs a structural approach to examine the influence of group racial composition on the behavior of group members. To be specific, this study assesses the effects of proportional representation on the behavior of Asian group members who were assigned to one of three types of groups: all-Asian groups, Asian-Caucasian balanced groups, and Caucasian-dominated groups. Groups were assigned the task of discussing and generating a solution for a managerial case scenario. The discussions were videotaped and viewed by independent judges who evaluated patterns of intragroup behavior, including levels of participation and leadership behavior among group members. The findings suggest that proportional representation can act as a significant source of influence on behavior of group members. We conclude this article with a discussion of the implications of these findings from both a practical and theoretical perspective.
This study sought to explain the contribution imbalance between minority and majority members of multicultural task groups in terms of differences in personal characteristics outside of racial or ethnic identity. Business students who volunteered to participate in a decision-making exercise were assigned to four-person groups on the bases of sex and minority status. A total of 41 multicultural groups were formed. Aftenvard, participants individually completed questionnaires on the experience and their personal characteristics. Low comnmnunication competetce, low inasculinity, and highfemininity were associated both with minority status and with low contribution to decision making. As a block the personal variables explained more variance in contribution to decision making than did minority status alone. In addition, high contributing minorities appeared to be motivated by needs unlike those of high contributing nonminorities. The implications of these findings for facilitators of multicultural groups are discussed.
A new status value theory of power is proposed that bridges two previously distinct research literatures. The theory asserts that exchangeable objects controlled by high-status actors are perceived to be more valuable when relevant to positive status characteristics. This phenomenon is predicted to confer power to high-status actors who exchange with low-status actors. The theoretical argument represents an important link between exchange theories of power and the research on status hierarchies-two areas that until now have been sharply demarcated. The theory is tested with a series of experiments in which status-differentiated subjects negotiate exchanges using a computerized bargaining system. The results indicate: (1) Positive status characteristics accentuate the perceived value of resources; (2) high-status subjects are most often chosen as the preferred exchange partner; and (3) high-status subjects obtain the greatest share of resources indicating power use. The implications for sociological theories of power and status are discussed.
Theoretical developments and empirical evidence over the past two and a half decades are reviewed with an attempt to assess the state of sociological knowledge about how, and conditions under which, external status characteristics of individuals affect their face-to-face interaction. This review describes the development of expectation states theory, which assumes a burden of proof process by which initially unrelated status characteristics become relevant to task performance, and task specific expectations determine patterns of interaction. Three versions of the theory, with increasing scope, are described and evidence relevant to them is summarized. Data from an independent test of the most recent version are presented, and the review concludes with a summary of knowledge and some suggestions for applications of the theory of status generalization effects.
In recent years, the criminal justice community has become increasingly concerned about the possibility that jury nullification is the underlying motivation for increasing numbers of acquittals and mistrials due to jury deadlock in felony jury trials. In this Article, the authors discuss the inherent difficulty in defining jury nullification and identifying its occurrence in actual trials. They review the evolution in public and legal opinion about the legitimacy of jury nullification and contemporary judicial responses to perceived instances of jury nullification. Finally, the authors examine the possible presence of jury nullification through empirical analysis of data collected from 372 felony jury trials in four state courts. Jurors' opinions about the fairness of the law proved to be related to trial outcomes. However, case characteristics, particularly the strength and credibility of trial evidence, were the strongest predictors of verdicts. The authors conclude that jury nullification is an unlikely factor in the vast majority of jury trials. When juror attitudes about legal fairness do play a role, they most likely do so by affecting how jurors perceive and interpret trial evidence, rather than by leading jurors to intentionally disregard the governing law.
Variations in the performance of real jurors of differing socioeconomic status who were deliberating on a mock trial were assessed. Male jurors participate more actively than female, and participation varies in direct ratio to length of education. Jurors spend 50 per cent of the time exchanging personal experiences, 25 per cent on procedural questions, 15 per cent on reviewing facts of the case, and 8 per cent on the court's instructions. The more educated give relatively more emphasis to procedure and instructions; the less educated to testimony, personal experiences, and opinions. Jurors appreciate participation in their fellows, apart from education. No significant differences were observed between the more-and the less-educated jurors in their ability either to influence other members of the jury or to be persuaded by them.
Purpose – This chapter discusses two puzzles emerging from the literature on race and the jury. First, although changes in laws and institutional practices have dramatically expanded jury participation, it is far from clear what additional changes would create more racially representative juries. Second, the push for racial diversity on juries stems, in part, from a belief that composition is related to decision making; nonetheless, empirical research typically fails to link jury composition and case outcomes.Methodology/approach – Through a review of recent research, I identify the bases for these puzzles, and I consider ways to advance the body of work on race and the jury.Findings – Studies on jury representativeness should simultaneously consider both institution-level and individual-level predictors of participation, examining in particular whether and how attitudes toward jury service differ across racial and ethnic groups. The literature would benefit most from longitudinal and multi-jurisdictional studies. Researchers on race and jury decision making should examine the reason why racial differences in attitudes and individual verdicts may not have an impact on case outcomes. By studying deliberating groups, scholars should consider whether any racial differences in viewpoints are substantively small, whether differences observed are ultimately irrelevant to group discussions, or whether group dynamics limit the participation and influence of racial minorities on mixed-race juries.Originality/value – This chapter advances the literature on race and the jury by considering both questions of representativeness and decision making and by critically examining a number of assumptions and accepted wisdom.
▪ Abstract The gender system includes processes that both define males and females as different in socially significant ways and justify inequality on the basis of that difference. Gender is different from other forms of social inequality in that men and women interact extensively within families and households and in other role relations. This high rate of contact between men and women raises important questions about how interaction creates experiences that confirm, or potentially could undermine, the beliefs about gender difference and inequality that underlie the gender system. Any theory of gender difference and inequality must accommodate three basic findings from research on interaction. (a). People perceive gender differences to be pervasive in interaction. (b). Studies of interaction among peers with equal power and status show few gender differences in behavior. (c). Most interactions between men and women occur in the structural context of roles or status relationships that are unequal. These s...
A strategy to modify racial inequality in task groups was tested. Based on social identity literature: If members of a group are encouraged to think of other group members as individuals instead of representatives of a larger group, cross-cutting categorization may decrease the effects of race. Thirty groups of one Black woman and two white women, were randomly assigned to either a condition in which group members knew only that some people did better than others on the task (baseline condition), or a condition in which individualization of group members was emphasized (cross-cutting condition). The task was exactly the same in both conditions; only the description of it varied. Relative to the baseline condition, the cross-cutting condition does not significantly decrease the inequality between Black and white group members. Implications of these results for future research on group racial dynamics are considered.
This paper develops a resource model of political participation. The resources considered are time, money, and civic skills—those communications and organizational capacities that are essential to political activity. These skills are not only acquired early in life but developed in the nonpolitical institutional settings of adult life: the workplace, organizations, and churches and synagogues. These resources are distributed differentially among groups defined by socioeconomic status. A two-stage least squares analysis shows these resources have powerful effects on overall political activity, thus explaining why socioeconomic status has traditionally been so powerful in predicting participation. We disaggregate overall activity into three kinds of acts: those that involve giving time, those that entail donating money, and voting. Each requires a different configuration of resources resulting in different patterns of stratification across various political acts.
This study investigates the impact of different types of expert testimony regarding the unreliability of eyewitness identification. In two hypothetical court cases involving eyewitnesses, expert testimony was presented that was either sample-based (presenting the results of a research program on eyewitness identification) or person-based (presenting information about the particular eyewitness under consideration); the expert either offered causal explanations for his unreliability claim or failed to do so. Two additional control groups (with and without eye-witness identification) were not presented with any expert testimony. The results indicate that subjects who had been confronted with an expert statement made more lenient judgments about the offender but did not discount the eyewitness identification completely. Sample-based information had a moderate impact on the subjects' judgments, regardless of whether or not causal explanations were given. Person-based testimony was the most influential type of expert advice when a causal explanation was provided but the least influential one when no reasons were given. The practical (international differences in admissibility of expert testimony) and theoretical implications (processing of base-rate information) of these findings are discussed.