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Jury Duty–One

The American jury is a small group. A limited number of people, in the range of six to twelve in number, are brought together and asked to make a joint unanimous decision. A crime has been committed and a defendant charged. The primary question: Is there enough evidence available to convict him or to find him not guilty?

Each unique jury is within a larger trial event that occurs inside of a social order and process. What will happen, the sequence of acts and the decisions made, is problematic, but the event is blocked in by the larger governing pattern. How the event is initiated, planned, convened, and supervised is fixed within a narrow range. As in baseball where each game played is an example of the possibilities inherent in the system of abstract rules, there is the abstract institution of the trial by jury governing each actual case.

At any trial there are participants and observers who are vitally concerned about the outcome. The defendant whose life, liberty, wealth, and reputation are in balance. The participating lawyers who are professionally responsible to present the best case for their own side. The victim (if alive) with friends and kin who want justice and, sometimes, retribution.

The sociologist, unless he is an actual party in a case, primarily wants to know how the game works. Truth, in the sense of approximating an exact understanding and reconstruction of what happened during the commission of a crime, is of critical importance within the trial process and the sociologist is interested is this as well but his main attention is on the actions and processes used by the people doing the work.

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There are several levels of description and understanding about juries and their actions…

(1) The institutional order, the pattern to which all jury trials adhere. This is given in law and in custom. There is a general knowledge of this abstract order derived from direct experience and from literary sources–movies, television, books. And of course there are the experts with wide knowledge of the system–its history, variations, changes, and challenges.

(2) The special acts of the particular juries. The concrete order. Each trial has its own jury made up of unique people who in carrying out their given task construct their own track.

(3) The professional lawyers and judges who work with juries and have detailed observations of how they work from an external but close up perspective. This gives us anecdotal observations of types of juries. The lawyers usually have their own sociology and psychology about how the process works. So how they participate in the selection of the jury, the rhetorical form of their arguments, their skill in questioning witnesses is part of a sociology in action.

(4) The general study of small decision making groups, mainly by academics who base their work on experiments with specially constituted groups of volunteers. They offer concepts of the group processes that occur in all such groups no matter the subject content.

(5) For jury trials past (either recent or distant) some have a literature (books, movies and etc.) produced in the main by journalists, historians, jury members, lawyers, judges. Some of these contain details of jury actions and process.

But all levels have a literature of reports and notes. It may be possible to work through these sources of data and find a classification of types of patterns. For example there is the notion of the run-away jury. It challenges the control of judge and lawyers to limit and channel its attention by trying to move to a more pro-active role like making statements to the press, making critical observations, offering new interpretations of the legal data and such. There is a technical term, nullification, for cases where the jury challenges the very law it is assigned to enforce.

One informal way of collecting and disseminating cases is to encourage any participant with sociological training (academic or ordinary) in a criminal trial jury to write up and publish a report of the experience (what happened) as a case study. These cases in themselves would add to the range of the base for classification–a form of low level theoretical work.

There is a web site, JuryExperiences.org, operating where jurors describe in detail their past jury work. The reporters of the few cases I have read are not sociology pros but their voices stay very close to their own version of the reality in which they participated They are witnesses of the concrete and sociologists manque.

There are three types of pattern for jury process and outcome that immediately jump out on going over even a few reports of participants:

(1) The run-away jury already discussed above.

(2) The pattern of agreement. The clarity of the weight of the facts presented by the lawyers and the instruction on the law by the judge lead all jury members to agree on their decision quickly with little discussion. Whether the decision is pro or contra the form and process work with little stress of confrontation.

(3) The pattern of disagreement. After discussion and voting the jurors realize that the group has split into sides. The form of the split varies by numbers and intensity of the disagreement but the presentations of the lawyers and the judge have lead to two or more views on what the facts are and to what conclusions they lead. How the jury and judge try to resolve these differences and find their way to a unified response or to a hung jury unable to find its way through to the expected decision becomes the significant question.

We will add more posts on this topic.

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Jury Duty–One

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