Jury Case Study

Trials by jury are adopted by most countries that use an adversarial legal system under the common law; that is when an impartial judge evaluates evidence gathered by two opposing parties independent of the juridical power as opposed to the civil law’s inquisitorial system where the court itself is involved in the investigation (Block, Parker, Vyborna & Dusek, 2000). The countries using the adversarial system, among which are the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia or USA, only use jury in high-profile criminal cases such as those involving murder, rape, manslaughter or false imprisonment (“When are juries used in criminal and civil cases?”). This makes up approximately 2% of all criminal trials (Lloyd-Bostock, as cited in Howitt, 2002) from

Pennington and Hastie (1992) found that when jurors were presented with the evidence in a chronological manner, they were much more likely to find the defendant guilty than when this evidence was given in a discrepant and non-structured way. This led them to propose a story model which is believed to be widely used by jurors to make sure they evaluated all the evidence in a strategic and sensible way. The model consists of creating a narrative based on a careful evaluation of all the collected evidence to assure that the jurors fully comprehend the case. This appears like a fairly reliable system to assess a crime. So why so much controversy? Yet again we should remind ourselves that jurors are untrained laypeople and as laypeople they do not always use the most systematic way of approaching incoming information. This might for example occur when the presented information is out of the jurors’ expertise and they are having hard time making estimations about the extent of a crime; in that case they are more likely to rely on heuristic processing (Bornstein & Greene, 2011). This is quite a rapid and automatic process enabling people to use shortcuts that help them to understand the issue better. When using this technique, jurors are more likely to attend to the peripheral cues, such as the confidence of an eyewitness, credibility of an expert,

That should probably convince us that trial by jury is the best possible way of deciding an ordeal as all jurors should be consistent in their decisions. So after what we have discussed we might ask a question why not simply use a trained expert who would evaluate all the evidence systematically just as well as the jury? This might partially be because we are interested in the individual differences of jurors, we rely on their use of unique knowledge and experience to assure that each case is being looked at from as many different angles as possible; and employing multiple jurors gives us a great variability of these