Storytelling Rituals in Jury Deliberations

Abstract

Research on jury deliberation tends to focus on deliberative outcomes, such as verdict decisions. Less attention is paid to the actual process of deliberation. This paper analyzes a video recording of a mock jury deliberation in a simulated criminal trial, focusing on facial expression, gesture, and discourse. Drawing on ethnomethodology and micro-sociological theories of ritual, I examine how jurors make sense of the evidence presented to them and how they work together to collectively produce a coherent narrative of events. I argue that a focus on the ritual dynamics of the deliberation help to understand how such a co-production can occur. La investigación sobre la deliberación del jurado tiende a centrarse en los resultados de esa deliberación, como pueden ser los veredictos. Menos atención genera el proceso mismo de deliberación. Este artículo analiza una grabación de vídeo de la deliberación de un jurado en un simulacro de juicio penal, y se fija especialmente en las expresiones faciales, los gestos y los discursos. Basándome en la etnometodología y en teorías de ritual microsociológicas, examino la forma en que los jurados buscan el sentido de las pruebas que se les presentan y la forma en que trabajan juntos para producir una narración coherente de los hechos. Argumento que poner el énfasis en las dinámicas rituales de la deliberación ayuda a entender cómo se realiza esa producción colectiva.

Facts into faults: The grammar of guilt in jury deliberations

“…According to the well-known 'story model' of juror decision-making, jurors weigh evidence presented during trial for the support it lends to competing stories of 'what happened', including those explicitly advanced by the prosecution and defense. As originally formulated Hastie, 1991/1992), this is something that happens inside individual minds, but other scholars have sought evidence that jurors also tell stories to, and with, one another (Conley and Conley, 2009;Rossner, 2019). The examples they adduce, however, generally involve less story-telling (à la Labov and Waletzky, 1967;Lerner, 1992) than comments on, and arguments about, particular pieces of evidence.…”

“…We call such statements conditional-contrastive inculpations, or CCIs. While other scholars have noted such formulations in passing (Conley and Conley, 2009;Manzo, 1994;Rossner, 2019), here we subject them to sustained analysis for the first time.…”

Making Independent Decisions Together: Rational Emotions in Legal Adjudication

“…Collins' model of interaction rituals has been used to study diverse social activities such as the formation of social activist groups (Summers‐Effler 2002), children's conflicts in school (Jensen and Vitus 2020), and jury deliberation (Rossner 2019). The present article continues this tradition by moving the analysis beyond the solitary adjudicator studied in most previous research on legal decision‐making, to a focus on interaction and how subjects' orientations adjust to the unfolding interactions.…”

“…Furthermore, the incorporation of actors (subjects) into the interaction chain (a deviation from Collins' original chain, which starts at the interaction level) enables a detailed examination of how discrete emotional processes can differentiate between actors with different stakes in the process and how actors combine and weigh subject positions so as to remain independent while maintaining the collective interaction order. For example, the requirement of unanimous decisions in jury deliberations positions the collective emotions of the interaction order over autonomy (Rossner 2019). In jury deliberation, the emphasis is on being judged by one's peers, rather than being judged by an objective (independent) arbiter.…”

“…Has she prepared for all possible objections from the defense? Here, I elaborate on how a contextual understanding can incorporate the way rational‐emotional decisions are formed in and through social interaction (see also Rossner 2019).…”