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It is generally considered that the requirement of unanimity results in more hung juries than does the alternative system of requiring only a majority of jurors to agree on a verdict. What constitutes a majority differs between jurisdictions that have embraced the concept, and may also depend on the type of offence being tried. This Report examines arguments for and against preserving the unanimity rule.
This monumental and comprehensive volume reviews more than 50 years of empirical research on civil and criminal juries and returns a verdict that strongly supports the jury system.
While jury decision making has received considerable attention from social scientists, there have been few efforts to systematically pull together all the pieces of this research. In Jury Decision Making, Dennis J. Devine examines over 50 years of research on juries and offers a "big picture" overview of the field. The volume summarizes existing theories of jury decision making and identifies what we have learned about jury behavior, including the effects of specific courtroom practices, the nature of the trial, the characteristics of the participants, and the evidence itself. Making use of those foundations, Devine offers a new integrated theory of jury decision making that addresses both individual jurors and juries as a whole and discusses its ramifications for the courts. Providing a unique combination of broad scope, extensive coverage of the empirical research conducted over the last half century, and theory advancement, this accessible and engaging volume offers "one-stop shopping" for scholars, students, legal professionals, and those who simply wish to better understand how well the jury system works.
This report is about the directions that judges give to juries in the course of a criminal trail, and particularly at the summing up. These directions are designed to help jurors understand as much of the law and the issues that arise in the case as they need to make proper use of the evidence and to reach a verdict.
This book presents the most complete set of analytical, normative, and historical discussions of majority decision making to date. One chapter critically addresses the social-choice approach to majority decisions, whereas another presents an alternative to that approach. Extensive case studies discuss majority voting in the choice of religion in early modern Switzerland, majority voting in nested assemblies such as the French Estates-General and the Federal Convention, majority voting in federally organized countries, qualified majority voting in the European Union Council of Ministers, and majority voting on juries. Other chapters address the relation between majority decisions and cognitive diversity, the causal origin of majority decisions, and the pathologies of majority decision making. Two chapters, finally, discuss the counter-majoritarian role of courts that exercise judicial review. The editorial Introduction surveys conceptual, causal, and normative issues that arise in the theory and practice of majority decisions.
The little understood yet great power of impeachment lodged in the Congress is dissected in this text through history by Raoul Berger, a leading scholar on the subject. He sheds new light on whether impeachment is limited to indictable crimes, on whether there is jurisdiction to impeach for misconduct outside office, and on whether impeachment must precede indictment. Berger also finds firm footing in contesting the views of one-time Judge Robert Bork and President Nixon's lawyer, James St Clair.
Juries have a bad reputation. Often jurors are seen as incompetent, biased and unpredictable, and jury trials are seen as a waste of time and money. In fact, so few criminal and civil cases reach a jury today that trial by jury is on the verge of extinction. Juries are being replaced by mediators, arbitrators and private judges. The wise trial of “Twelve Angry Men” has become a fiction. As a result, a foundation of American democracy is about to vanish. The Jury Crisis: What’s Wrong with Jury Trials and How We Can Save Them addresses the near collapse of the jury trial in America – its causes, consequences, and cures. Drury Sherrod brings his unique perspective as a social psychologist who became a jury consultant to the reader, applying psychological research to real world trials and explaining why juries have become dysfunctional. While this collapse of the jury can be traced to multiple causes, including poor public education, the absence of peers and community standards in a class-stratified, racially divided society, and people’s reluctance to serve on a jury, the focus of this book is on the conduct of trials themselves, from jury selection to evidence presentation to jury deliberations. Judges and lawyers believe – wrongly – that jurors can put aside their biases, sit quietly through hours, days or weeks of conflicting testimony, and not make up their minds until they have heard all the evidence. Unfortunately, the human brain doesn’t work that way. A great deal of psychological research on jurors and other decision-makers shows that our brains intuitively leap to story-telling before we rationally analyze “facts,” or evidence. Weaving details into a narrative is how we make sense of the world, and it’s very hard to suppress this tendency. Consequently, a majority of jurors actually make up their minds before they have heard much of the evidence. Judges, arbitrators and mediators have similar biases. The Jury Crisis deals with an important social problem, namely the near collapse of a thousand year old institution, and proposes how to fix the jury system and restore trial by jury to a more prominent place in American society.
Forensic psychology has developed and extended from an original, narrow focus on presenting evidence to the courts to a wider application across the whole span of civil and criminal justice, which includes dealing with suspects, offenders, victims, witnesses, defendants, litigants and justice professionals. This Handbook provides an encyclopedic-style source regarding the major concerns in forensic psychology. It is an invaluable reference text for practitioners within community, special hospital, secure unit, prison, probation and law enforcement forensic settings, as well as being appropriate for trainees and students in these areas. It will also serve as a companion text for lawyers and psychiatric and law enforcement professionals who wish to be apprised of forensic psychology coverage. Each entry provides a succinct outline of the topic, describes current thinking, identifies relevant consensual or contested aspects and alternative positions. Readers are presented with key issues and directed towards specialized sources for further reference.