This study uses a new criminal case data set to partially replicate Kalven and Zeisel's classic study of judge‐jury agreement. The data show essentially the same rate of judge‐jury agreement as did Kalven and Zeisel for cases tried almost 50 years ago. This study also explores judge‐jury agreement as a function of evidentiary strength (as reported by both judges and juries), evidentiary complexity (as reported by both judges and juries), legal complexity (as reported by judges), and locale. Regardless of which adjudicator's view of evidentiary strength is used, judges tend to convict more than juries in cases of “middle” evidentiary strength. Judges tend to acquit more than juries in cases in which judges regard the evidence favoring the prosecution as weak. Judges tend to convict more than juries in cases in which judges regard the evidence favoring the prosecution as strong. Rates of adjudicator agreement are thus partly a function of which adjudicator's view of evidentiary strength is used, a result not available to Kalven and Zeisel, who were limited to judges’ views of the evidence. We find little evidence that evidentiary complexity or legal complexity help explain rates of judge‐jury disagreement. Rather, the data support the view that judges have a lower conviction threshold than juries. Local variation exists among the sites studied. The influences of juror race, sex, and education are also considered.
We analyze thousands of trials from a substantial fraction of the nation's most populous counties. Evidence across 10 years and three major data sets suggests that: (1) juries and judges award punitive damages in approximately the same ratio to compensatory damages, (2) the level of punitive damages awards has not increased, and (3) juries' and judges' tendencies to award punitive damages differ in bodily injury and no‐bodily‐injury cases. Jury trials are associated with a greater rate of punitive damages awards in financial injury cases. Judge trials are associated with a greater rate of punitive damages awards in bodily injury cases.
What explains the way in which jurors cast their first vote in a criminal trial, before the dynamics of the deliberation process take over? Analysis of 3,000 jurors in criminal trials in four major metropolitan areas indicates, consistent with prior research, that jurors pay great attention to the evidence. The stronger the evidence against the defendant, the more likely the juror is to vote guilty. We also find that jurors dislike police duplicity. Police officers who give unbelievable testimony will, all else being equal, push jurors toward a first vote of not guilty. Beyond that, our conclusions are specific and limited to a particular jurisdiction. A juror's beliefs about the fairness of the law or the harshness of the consequences of conviction make a difference in some jurisdictions under some circumstances, but not in other jurisdictions under different circumstances. We also find that African-American jurors in the District of Columbia sitting on cases involving minority defendants charged with drug offenses are, unlike jurors in other jurisdictions, less likely to vote for conviction on the first ballot (but not on the final one) compared to white jurors. Our results therefore highlight the importance of analyzing juror behavior at a more local level. Analyzing juror behavior at the aggregate level can conceal important local variation.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to an impartial jury selected from a jury pool that reflects the demographic composition of the geographic community served by the court. Yet there is little consensus in case law from state and federal courts about the most appropriate method of measuring demographic representation or the degree of underrepresentation that would violate the fair‐cross‐section requirement. Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently addressed these issues for the first time since Duren v. Missouri, its opinion in Berghuis v. Smith did little to settle the questions. In the present article, the authors use demographic information from the U.S. Census Bureau and information about jury operations in state courts from the National Center for State Courts to estimate the potential impact of competing proposals about how to measure demographic representation at different threshold levels of constitutional tolerance. Given the demographic composition of counties in the United States and the size of the jury pool in most courts, the authors find that a bright‐line rule using either of the two most common measures of representation (absolute disparity and comparative disparity) would create “safe harbors” in which the courts in a majority of jurisdictions across the country would become effectively immune from fair‐cross‐section challenges.
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